Chapter One:
All four of the turtles were in the dojo when the explosion went off. It shook the confines of their home and made dust fall from the ceiling. The tree that grew up from the center of the room trembled and groaned in protest. Within seconds, the shaking stopped and they all exchanged worried looks.
"What the shell was that!?" Mikey asked. Completely forgetting that he was supposed to be fighting Donnie.
"I don't know," Leo admitted. "Whatever it was, it couldn't have been good."
"Earthquake?" Raph suggested halfheartedly. Donnie shook his head.
"No, earthquakes in New York are very rare. There aren't even any plate boundaries within hundreds of miles of here."
They were interrupted by the tell-tail ringtone Donnie had set for April. He froze and smiled sheepishly.
"Heh, sorry. I'll just go and uh, yeah. Hold on." He took out his t-phone eagerly. "Hey! April, how are you-" he stopped and listened intently. The remaining turtles crowded in closer in an attempt to hear, only to be pushed away again by Donnie. He suddenly clutched the phone tight and his jaw dropped open in horror.
"O-okay. W-w-we'll be there as soon as we can." He hung up, and slowly turned to his brothers.
"Guys something awful has happened."
Mikey gasped. "Pizza was banned from New York City?!" Donnie shook his head.
"No, it's even worse." He looked at them with utmost seriousness and despair. "The Kraang blew up the Brooklyn Bridge. There were no survivors."
"I'm so excited!" Cass squealed for the 15th time that morning. Tori giggled at her cousin's excitement.
"I know! I haven't been to New York City since I was 7 years old!" she exclaimed, remembering her frequent visits to the city when she was younger, before she had moved out of the state. "I can't wait to see how much it's changed. Not that I can remember much from before other than all the awesome toy stores and ridiculously long lines of Black Friday." They both ogled at all the people and buildings at least ten times taller than any that they would find in Montana.
"I've never even been to New York before and now that I'm here I just can't believe it!" Cass was so close to her window, her nose squished up against the glass. "I can't wait to see the Empire State Building, and the Museum of Natural History, oh! And don't forget the ferry that we're taking to the Statue of Liberty! And the-" Tori laughed happily.
"Yeah I know! We still have a long drive ahead of us though so don't, you know, hyperventilate before we get there or something." Tori looked out her own window to the taxi next to theirs. "Hey look, there's my mom and dad."
Cass leaned forward to look out of her cousin's window and waved so spastically she knocked Tori's "I ? NYC" cap off. She laughed and bent down under the seat, her arm bent at an odd angle to reach it. Suddenly, there was a thunderous boom, and the taxi driver slammed on his brakes. Her body jerked forward before the seatbelt could react, her arm snapping and she hit her head hard on the seat in front of her.
She groaned as pain shot up and down her now broken arm, and her head throbbed.
"What was-" she started to growl, still hunched down, but she was cut off by the synchronized screams of both Cass and the driver, and the blistering heat of open flames burning and peeling away her skin. As suddenly as the flames came, they were gone and was replaced with something far less pleasant.
Unidentifiable green goo oozed in through the shattered windows and coated her shriveled skin. Each drop burned more than the inferno had, and every particle buried itself into her flesh. The blinding pain made her scream in agony, and soon she welcomed unconsciousness with open arms.
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Due to possible architectural damage, the police, detectives, and firefighters were not aloud to investigate the area of the explosion, and instead spent their time making sure curious civilians didn't cross the yellow tape. This, however, proved to be very useful to the four mutant turtles as Donnie carefully studied the bomb with Mikey standing guard and Raph searching for possible survivors with Leo. So far it was just one horribly burnt corpse after another. Raph felt closer to throwing up after every vehicle he checked, and was suddenly very glad that Mikey didn't have to see this. He'd have nightmares for years.
"Why would they do this?" Leo muttered unhappily. "Why just set off a bomb. These people haven't done anything wrong. They were just normal people going about their normal lives. They don't even know about the Kraang's existence. So why bomb them for no reason?"
Raph shook his head. "I dunno Leo. Maybe they think it'll make their lives easier to have a few hundred less humans to deal with." He glanced over at Donnie who was poking the bomb suspiciously with someone's windshield wiper.
He sighed and peeked into another faded yellow taxi. This one had an almost completely incinerated driver, and two passengers. The first one was burnt beyond recognition. The second one was hunched over as if she had hidden from the inferno from behind the seat in front of her. Unlike her companion, she was only slightly burnt. The back of her shirt was almost non-existent and her skin was covered in third degree burns- and she was breathing!
"Donnie, I got a live one over here!" he shouted. All three of his brothers looked over at him with mixed expressions of disbelief, hope, and concern. As they rushed to join him, he carefully extracted her from her seatbelt, and pulled her from the car. Her arm was bent at an unusual angle, and her hair and face were covered in soot, but she was alive. Donnie quickly kneeled beside Raph and immediately went into doctor mode.
"Third degree burns, broken humerus, possible concussion, and-" He stopped speaking and just stared at in mixed fascination and disbelief. For a moment, no-one could tell what had stopped him from running a diagnosis, but then they saw it for themselves. The incredibly sensitive raw burnt skin on her back was healing itself right before their eyes; stitching itself together and producing new skin tissue at an impossible rate. Suddenly Donnie was struck with realization.
"I don't think this was just a slaughter fest," he explained. "I think this was an experiment of the Kraang's. The bomb must have been infused with mutagen."
Raph looked down at the young girl -who he just realized couldn't be any older than himself- skeptically. "If she was exposed to mutagen, then why doesn't she look like a monster?"
Donnie considered this for a moment. "Usually when a human is exposed to mutagen, their DNA becomes infused with the DNA of the last organic thing they touched. Since she was blasted with incredible heat from a bomb first though, any foreign DNA that was on her would have been scorched off. That way, there was no other DNA to fuse with. Her body instinctively knew that she needed to heal herself in order to live, so it used the mutagen to created regenerative healing within her."
Leo soaked this in, carefully considering all his options. "If the kraang wanted something like this to happen, does that mean they'll try to take her back with them to test the results?" he asked.
Donnie shrugged. "I would assume so. It's unlikely they would go through so much trouble to do this and not check the results. So far as I can tell, there's nothing we can do but take her back to the layer with us."
He expected cries of protest, but none came. They all knew that they couldn't just leave her there for the kraang to find, and the hospitals wouldn't know what to do with a patient with mutant powers. Mikey, who had been uncharacteristically quiet to this point, was tasked with carefully carrying the girl back to the layer with Donnie while Leo and Raph stayed behind to look for anymore survivors, even if they knew they wouldn't find any.
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By the time Mikey and Donnie got back to the lair with the girl, she was almost completely healed. Donnie couldn't help but sneak glances at her every once in awhile, intrigued by the new, almost impossible, healing advancement occurring right in front of him. Never had he ever seen anything that was that ... exciting. If he could duplicate the white blood cells and put them in a neutral blood type serum, it could becomes the world's best healing agent. Of course, there was no way he was going to subject the mysterious girl to being a science experiment for the rest of her life. Maybe just for emergencies?
They had given Master Splinter a quick run through on why they had brought a complete stranger into their home and he had welcomed the idea of helping the poor girl (once the situation had been explained) with open arms.
When Mikey set her down on the table, they both stared at her for a moment. She was now perfectly fine aside from being completely filthy. She had long, wispy black hair, and a petite face sporting a small nose, full lips, and long eyelashes. She was small, and very thin, but she didn't look weak. She definitely had more muscle than the average teenage girl, but nothing compared to the lean muscular build of Donnie and his brothers. She had strong calf muscles which suggested she was a runner, and blunted skin around her knuckles that said she did more than a little boxing with a bag.
Donnie ran her through another check up, but she seemed to be in perfect condition- other than the obvious fact that she still hadn't woken up.
"Well now what?" Mikey blurted. Donnie shrugged helplessly.
"I don't know. There's not much I can do. I could give her an IV drip to keep her from getting dehydrated, but aside from that, all we can do is wait for her to wake up." So wait they did. Eventually Raph and Leo came back looking exhausted and weathered, but anxious to see Donnie's new patient.
"How's she doing Donnie?" Leo asked. Donnie looked up from where he had been about to fall asleep.
"I don't know." He admitted. "Ideally she would be awake by morning, but I can't really tell. This goes way beyond my medical capabilities."
Raph shrugged and started gravitating towards the door thinking of his wonderfully warm bed. "She'll come around. But until then, maybe we should get some sleep. Staring at her won't make her wake up any faster." And then he was gone. Leo exchanged a look with Donnie.
"He's right. How about you go to bed Don. I'll sleep on the couch and if she wakes up, I'll hear her." Donnie nodded and the turtles went their separate ways.