Three timid knocks sounded on the lab door, and Don knew immediately the only person that it could be. Leo's were much more purposeful, Raph's harsh and pounding, Master Splinter's, much more clipped and closer in rhythm. Mikey usually forgot to knock altogether, instead making his presence known by exploding into the room and babbling about whatever was on his mind at the moment. And Casey? Casey would only enter nerd territory if forced at weapon-point (which was fine by Donnie).
No, this particular knock was his favorite, and his heart gave a little flutter.
"Come on in, April, it's clear!" He stood to greet her at the door.
"Hi, Donnie!" she chirped, then looked a bit bashful. "Are… you busy right now?"
"Oh… No, not with anything terribly critical… Just reviewing my retromutagen experiment notes."
"Ah. Good… I could really use your help."
"Sure. What do you need?"
"Well, the school science fair is coming up… My chemistry teacher is offering boku extra credit points to the winning entries, and my grade has… kind of been slipping since I've been out so much, what with invasions and mutations and late night fights and so on. So I really need something impressive to win it and pull my grade back up… nothing run of the mill as baking soda vinegar volcanoes and Coke and Mentos explosions… Think you can—"
Don's eyes brightened, and he beamed at her. "Say no more, you don't even have to ask!" The purple-banded ninja genius scurried over to his shelves of instruments and racks of chemicals, gathering up flasks and beakers, powders and liquids, before returning to the lab table with them. He handed April a pair of safety goggles and donned (haha) his own. "Safety first, science second!" he quipped, and April smiled at him. Next, he helped her into a lab coat. "There, don't you look sciencey?" he clasped his hands, looking at her like a proud parent. "Oh, wait, one last touch…" He reached into a drawer, and clipped a blue bow-tie to her collar. "There… 'Pril O'Nye, the Science… guyyy—irl? That's where the rhyme falls down."
She rolled her eyes. "Cute. But let's get on with it." She readied her pencil and notepad as Don began dictating what he was doing. "This is called the Briggs-Rauscher reaction, also known as the oscillating clock, because of how regular the chemical change happens." He held up various vials as he began mixing the substances together. "Here we have a mixture of sulfuric acid, H2SO4, and potassium iodide, KIO3, in distilled water. Next, we make another mixture, this one of malonic acid, that's HOOCCH2COOH…"
April scowled at her notes. "You're kidding me…"
"Yeah, it's a real monster of a compound," Don chuckled.
"I'll just refer to it as 'hooch' for short…" she replied, earning another laugh from the turtle.
"And this is mixed with MnSO4 . H2O, manganese sulfate monohydrate, to which we're going to add a little bit of starch. We'll mix them together, give them a little whirl on the stirring plate, and put that on to heat, since it'll speed up the reaction, while we mix our last solution." He held up a familiar brown bottle.
"Hydrogen peroxide," April identified.
"Right! Chemical form?" he quizzed her.
"H2O2 ."
"Correct! This is the 30 percent dilution… way more concentrated than the three percent we use for cuts and scrapes! We dilute that a little, combine the two, and then we pour that into the other beaker. You do the honors."
April added the peroxide, poured one beaker into the other, and looked up at Don. "What's supposed to…" She looked up at Donnie, but quickly back as the solution changed to amber for a moment, then immediately to a very dark blue. "Oh. Okay, well, that's…" She was halted as the mixture just as suddenly turned clear again. Then amber, then dark blue again. "Whoa! That's cool! How long does it do that?"
"Until it's all used up… a couple of hours. There's nearly thirty separate reactions going on here, but mainly, it comes down to two reactions competing against each other… Aaannnd, you're getting that kind of glassed-over look my brothers give me when I over-explain things…"
"It's… a little beyond me. But I like you talking about it… You're so animated, and your eyes get this sparkle when you talk about something you're passionate about…"
He gave a bashful little chuckle as he claimed her notepad to write down the chemical symbols for the two reactions for her:
IO3- + 2 H2O2 + CH2(CO2H)2 + H+ - ICH(CO2H)2 + 2 O2 + 3 H2O
HOI + CH2(CO2H)2 - ICH(CO2H)2 + H2O
April stared at them. "This is…" she let out a heavy breath, "…really complicated. I'm gonna have to do all of this in a presentation… class is gonna be out before I get through it!" She looked up at him pleadingly. "Do you have anything a little less complicated?"
"No problem. One sec…"
Don exited the lab. After a moment, there was a belligerent cry of, "Hey, Poindexter, I was using that!"
"Have it back in a second, Raph…" the voice of the purple-banded turtle called in return, as Don reentered the lab with a bottle of dish soap. He grabbed a large beaker and a jar of dry chemical, swirled some water into the powder in it, then seized the bottle of peroxide and a large flask.
"Better do this one in the garage," he said, leading the way through the lab's back exit, juggling the flask, soap, beaker and peroxide. April relieved him of some of his load since he seemed to be out of hands. He gave her a grateful look.
"Now, then…" he said, holding the flask out, "our hydrogen peroxide goes in here, and then, if you will, a couple generous squirts of the dish detergent… And if we had any food coloring, you'd add that too, but Mikey has it hidden somewhere…"
"All right…" She positioned the bottle over the narrow neck of the flask and gave a firm squeeze…
…which caused the lid to pop off the bottle and dump in much more soap than she had intended. April gasped and righted the bottle, excess soap dribbling off the sides and over her hands. She telekinetically lifted the lid out of the mix and screwed it back on the bottle.
"Oh no…" She grimaced, setting the messy bottle on the floor. "Sorry!"
Don looked at the flask's contents, poured in a bit more peroxide to compensate, and said, "Eh, it should be fine. We might get more foam than I'd intended, but it's not going to mess anything up. Now… Ready?"
"As ever," she grinned back, and he handed her the catalyst.
"They call it 'elephant toothpaste,' but it's not really toothpaste, and isn't really for elephants. We're going to see a reaction between the H2O2 and the saturated potassium iodide," he nodded to the beaker, "which in the end will produce H2O and a lot of O2, which we'll see captured by the soap bubbles. When you're ready… Stand clear…"
"Okay," April said, dumping the beaker into the peroxide, and then taking a leap back as a jet of foam shot out of the flask, high against the garage ceiling, and just kept coming. She gave an amused little shriek and laughed out loud as foam started falling down on them from the ceiling, and Don grinned widely at her with his gap-toothed smile at her reaction. They watched the immense amount of foam forming for another few minutes after the turtle had set the flask down, continuing the chemical reaction, though at a slightly slower rate.
"And… this keeps on going until one ingredient or the other is all used up?"
"Yep," he confirmed. "So, ah, we can just leave this here for the time being… I'll clean up the mess up later…" They abandoned the flask and returned to the lab. "So will that one work for your project?" He handed her a clean towel for the soap coating her hands as she washed off the rest in the sink.
April winced. "I love it, but… it seems like it'd be a little too messy for school… I'm sorry, Donnie… Do you know of anything else, you know, a little more… contained?"
"Oh! Uh, sure! How about…" He thought for a second, went to his shelves and gathered a number of small metal dishes, a large bottle and an armload of jars of powdered chemicals. He handed the bottle over to her. "Now, if you'd pour a couple tablespoonfuls of that methanol into each dish, I'll measure out the salts."
"What is this for?" she asked, doling the alcohol out as requested.
"We are going to make some very pretty fire by burning different kinds of metallic salts," he said as he finished mixing the last dish and pulled out a barbecue lighter. "Would you mind hitting the lights?"
She obliged, waving a hand at the light switch, which compliantly clicked off, leaving them in the faint glow of the lighter's flame. "Ooh, candlelight experiment!"
The turtle scientist waggled his eyebrows at her. "Romantic, huh?" He motioned her to his side of the desk and handed her the lighter. "Go ahead and light them up.
April did so, oohing at the surprising colors of the flames: dark blue, bright yellow, deep orange, red, green, and lilac.
"So the dark blue is simply methanol on its own, which burns dark blue. Then there's lithium methoxide that burns red, calcium chloride for bright orange, table salt, good old NaCl, or sodium chloride for yellow, boric acid for the green, potassium chloride for purple, barium chloride for pale yellow, copper chloride, green, strontium for crimson. And these burning metal salts are what give fireworks their different colorations."
"Neat," April said, finishing up her notes, sounding dubious, "but maybe not complex enough…?" Don wilted slightly, giving her a somewhat disappointed look. "I know, I know… I just want it to be something really special and showy…. something that'll really knock the judges' socks off!"
Don gripped his chin with one hand. "Let me think… Gonna have to bring out the big guns…"
After pacing for a couple of minutes, he snapped his fingers and left the lab. "Mikey?" he called.
"Yeah, dude?" Mikey answered from the pit, jerking his controller around wildly as he played his video game.
"Do you have any gummy bears left?"
"Sorry, D, all gone… 'cept maybe the ones I dropped under my bed."
The scientific turtle grimaced and headed back to his lab to retrieve a rubber squeegee broom he only used for really unsavory spills. One step into Michelangelo's room, and he wished he'd brought a gas mask and a biohazard suit. Holding his breath, he used the broom to fish around under Mikey's bed, pulling out a plethora of dust bunnies, candy wrappers, pizza crusts and other filth… but amid the mess were a couple of gummy bears that had survived the ravenous snackfest that was the orange-banded brother.
"There's one!" Mikey exclaimed, having suddenly joined his brother at looking at the lint pile on the floor. He grabbed the little green bear and tossed it in his mouth, making Don fairly nauseated.
"That is just unsanitary… you need to clean your room!" Don said, rescuing the few remaining candies and retreating back to the lab.
"You're not the boss of me," Mikey fired back.
Leo walked by at that moment. "Mikey, clean your room."
"And you're only the leader outside of the lair, Leo! My room, my rules, brah!" he crowed triumphantly.
…until Master Splinter walked by, following Leo's path. "Michelangelo! Do as your brother says and clean your room!"
The youngest let out a long-suffering sigh. "Haiii, Sensei…."
Don returned to the lab and retrieved another chemical, which he measured into a test tube, then placed in a holder and brought the flame of a Bunsen burner beneath it.
"Now… we heat our potassium chlorate to 214 degrees Centigrade, where it becomes molten, and with the tongs there, you can add the gummy bear, and then step back, because it's going to give a very violent exothermic reaction, releasing the roughly seven kilocalories in this very concentrated source of sugar."
April did as instructed, and the tube gave a sudden roar and flame and smoke shot out of its barrel. Her jaw fell open as she watched the reaction, and she turned, beaming, to Donnie. The turtle brightened, grinning back, heartened at her evident pleasure. "This one!" she stated, just as the lab door swung open.
"Yo, Nerdle the Turtle, I need—Are you guys toasting marshmallows in here? Dude…" Casey's attention shifted as he caught a whiff of the sugary smoke permeating the lab.
April reacted to him first. "Casey?! What are you doing?! Be careful!"
"Casey! How many times to I have to tell everyone not to just walk into the lab?! It's dangerous!" Don lectured.
The lanky vigilante paid neither of them any mind, instead drawn to the continued whistling and screaming from the fiery demise of the gummy bear. "Aw, yes! This is totally metal!"
"Actually, no, it's not metal; it's sodium reacting with sucrose—What are you doing in here?!"
"Hopin' you could hook me up with some easy extra credit… And this baby looks like it'd do the trick!" he smarmed as the reaction let out a last few sputters and gouts of flame.
Don altered his earlier thought: Casey would only enter his lab at weapon-point, or grade-point.
"Casey, that's my project!" April whined.
"C'mon, Red…" he gap-grinned at her, turning up the charm, "You know I'm gonna flunk unless I make something really spectacular for the science fair!" He pointed to the lab table. "You can enter the pretty unicorn fire over there."
"I didn't want the salt fire; that's why we were doing this one in the first place!" she griped, but Casey was busy poking at and burning his fingers on the hot test tube as he attempted to grab it. She growled to herself at being upstaged and ignored.
Don glowered at him in a long look, taking the tube out of its clamp with tongs. "If I give you the formula and the chemical for it, will you leave?"
"Aw, Donnie, don't you want me to stay?" the vigilante teased, leaning over Don's desk and batting his eyelids at him as he accepted the little bottle Don passed him.
Donatello scrawled the chemical equation on a piece of paper and shoved it into Jones's hand. "No. Get out."
"You know you love me."
"Like a hole in the ozone layer. And don't slam the—"
SLAM!
Don seethed silently, but let it go for the moment… only to turn back to a likewise disgruntled face. He recognized 'determined April face' when he saw it. She gave a stern nod, which he returned. She was ready to take Casey down.
"There's no rule saying you can't do the same experiment as another student, is there?"
April continued to glare. "No, but if I have the same project as Casey, neither of us will get as much credit for originality… Our professor knows we work together a lot. It'll just look like he copied me, or I copied him."
"Unlikely… Simple as that experiment is, I don't fully trust that mental midget to get it right." The terrapin tapped his chin in thought for a moment, then snapped his fingers. "Not too complex, not too simple, not too messy, but still showy… I think I've got something. One sec…" Once more, he exited the lab in search of the necessary ingredients, this time raiding the kitchen for a pack of rigatoni noodles, a jam jar, and… where was it? Mikey was the one who knew the ins and outs of the kitchen. "Hey, Mike? Do we have any active dry yeast?"
An irate, sarcastic tone answered, "I dunno, it might be somewhere in my oh-so-messy room, which I'm now forced to clean!"
"Come on, Mikey, this is for April…" He was met with a stream of too-loud humming. "Look, I'm sorry I got you roped into cleaning, but your room really does need it…"
"Not winning you any points, bro. Though maybe if I didn't have the strain of having to clean my room and cook and do dishes tonight on my mind, I might remember where the yeast is…"
"Alright, alright… I'll agree to do the dishes for you if you tell me where the yeast is."
"Second drawer from the silverware, back corner."
"Thank you…"
"Pleasure doing business with ya, bro."
Don eeshed to himself, but was interrupted by another irate yell from across the lair. "Where's that soap, Donnie? I wanna wash down the stealth bike before it gets too cold."
"Right, right… have it to you in just a minute, Raph…" Don assured flippantly as he returned to a waiting April.
"What's this one, then?" she asked as Don punched a hole in the flat lid of the jar with a nail.
"Macaroni rocket fuel," he said with a smile, and she could see that 'Science Is Awesome' sparkle in his eyes again. He grabbed a bottle of normal medical peroxide from the first aid cabinet.
"H2O2 ," she stated dutifully.
Donnie beamed. "We fill the jar about three-quarters full, then add about a teaspoon of the dry yeast, which starts releasing pure oxygen from the hydrogen peroxide. That's our gaseous fuel source. Then we put the lid on so the gas is directed through the hole here… but don't put the jar ring on; if there's a buildup of heat or pressure from the reaction, it could explode the jar, and the last thing we want is glass shards in your beautiful face."
April rolled her eyes at his flirting.
He set a single piece of the pasta atop the hole in the jar. "Now our gaseous fuel, our oxidant, is passing through our solid fuel source, and it just needs a little heat—" he snapped the long-barreled lighter on, lighting the pasta on fire, "—to start the oxidation process on the solid fuel." A bright, high flame glowed from the rigatoni as it slowly burned.
"This is similar to the sort of fuel used in actual rockets. I mean, not starchy pasta, but a long-burning solid fuel compound, combined and oxidized to produce enough thrust to escape the planet's atmosphere, where, as you've experienced, it takes very little thrust to keep an object moving in a single direction."
April scrawled all he told her down in her notes, a smile of fascination holding her mouth open. Notes finished, she turned the grin on him. "It's perfect. Thank you so much, Donnie—" she said, rising up on her toes to aim her lips toward his cheek, but…
"DONNIE!" Leo's shout carried to them. "Why is there a wall of foam trying to invade the lair?!"
He flinched. "Ohhh… uh-oh…" He looked to the back of the lab and yelped, noticing the churning bubbles intruding into his space as well. "That is way more than that experiment should have produced…"
"Too much dish detergent?" April offered with an apologetic grimace. "Those bubbles aren't dangerous, or, say, skin irritant, are they?"
"No…" he answered distractedly. "No, at this concentration, they wouldn't produce any kind of irritation for hours…"
"DONNIE! Where in all shell is the soap?!"
"Don't use it all, Raph… Don needs to do the dishes for me!"
The purple-banded brother winced, an expression of dread crossing his face. April reached out and grabbed his hand. "Come on," she beckoned. "They won't find us for a while if we hide in the foam."
Don chuckled his amusement as he let himself be led into the mountain of froth, as his brothers continued shouting for him. Meanwhile, obscured by the bubbles, he and April started making some chemistry of their own.
x-x-x-x-x
a/n: A story commission for MiharutheKunoichi, winner of one of my stories in the TMNT2012Fans Wrap Party raffle. She requested "a cute fic with Donnie and April bonding over an experiment in Don's lab." The whole experiment seems to be finding the right experiment, though. ;)
Real actual science courtesy of "top 10 mad science worthy experiments" on Neatorama and NightHawkInLight on YouTube. I've included the essence of these demos, but I've left out or exaggerated bits and bobs, so trust the actual science, not me, if you want to try these experiments on your own. Don's right; safety first, science second!