Three
As he stares down his third brick wall of the evening, Raph has mixed emotions.
For starters, he's glad that his direction-finding services will turn out to be needed, that he hasn't come all this way just to discover that the route is open, and that they all should have stuck together in the first place. (He hates it when Leo is right.) At the same time, he's angry that some stranger has come uninvited into his home, and thrown up an inconvenient barrier across his hallway. And, to round out the sampler course of feelings, he has a sneaking suspicion that he is going to see a lot more brick walls tonight, in places where he would rather not see them, and he is resigned to spending a lot of time working through the tunnels, searching for a way home.
"Fuck you," he says to the wall, and the wall's cowed silence makes him feel a little better.
He stands there, basking in his verbal victory, sorting out what to do next. His first-choice route is blocked. If he goes much further along the tunnel he has been following, he will quickly find himself in unfamiliar territory. If he goes back, there were several turnoffs that will lead him home by long, roundabout routes, turnoffs that he knows are not blocked.
That is, unless they are blocked further up.
He decides to try them. In the interest of not traversing the same ground more times than he has to, he will try them in the order he comes to them, following each side tunnel methodically, until it either ends or deposits him in the place he is trying to reach. All he has to do is keep track of which passages he has or has not explored.
Easy.
With one last menacing glare at the wall, Raphael turns back.
The wall, frozen with fear, remains where it is.
They'd agreed to a watch rotation, that cold night in the sewers, but everyone was too edgy and uncomfortable to sleep yet.
"Master Splinter'll be goin' nuts," Raph commented, a weak attempt at making them feel better by pointing out that other people weren't doing so great either.
"Oh!" Don searched through the pouches of his belt, and pulled out his -
What had he called them then?
- his turtle-com, that newfangled doodad he'd worked up in his spare time. Later it would turn out to be the precursor to the shell-cell, but that first prototype was more like a walkie-talkie, an early attempt at copying the portable telephone. He only had two of them, then - the one that was in his hand, and the one that was somewhere in the Lair.
Don fiddled with the switches and dials, trying to get reception, or whatever. Then he held down the big yellow button with his thumb. "Hello? Master Splinter?"
A thin hiss of static.
Don readjusted the controls, and tried again. "Master Splinter, are you there?"
If he was, he was having no luck with responding.
"Sorry, guys." Don moved to put the com away, but Leo held out his hand for it. Don gave it to him, and he tucked it under the strap of his sword belt, where it would be easier to reach if Master Splinter tried to contact them.
The device remained silent all night.
Raph had last watch, in the morning, when his brothers had finally all fallen asleep, so he was first to hear the soft approaching footsteps.
He was on his feet in an instant, his weapons in his hands, but something told him not to use them. He stood over his brothers, and waited.
The person around the corner of the tunnel paused too, then emerged.
"Master Splinter!" Raph hurriedly sheathed his sai, and toed his brothers into wakefulness. "Guys, get up!"
"Master Splinter!" Mike said thickly, through a nose already filling with snot.
"Are you safe?" Splinter asked, going over each of them with his eyes.
"We're okay, Sensei," Leo reported. "There were these men working near the Lair..."
"I know." Master Splinter produced the second turtle-com from a fold of his robe. "I tried to warn you, but -" He offered the device to Donatello. "I do not think it is working. The men are gone now," he added.
They shouldered their packs, and went home.
Later, Donatello had given Master Splinter some serious lessons on the uses and operation of the turtle-coms.
Similar lessons had been given, to little avail, after the advent of the shell-cell.
Not that it mattered now.
Raph flicks his thumb over the useless lump in his belt, and keeps walking.
Mike blinks at the deserted tunnel. "Donnie?" he says, in a small voice.
He'd been following his brother, keeping his mouth shut and his eyes focused on Donatello's back.
Then he'd blinked, and Don was gone.
He keeps blinking, hoping Don will come back, but it isn't working.
"Donnie?" he says again. "This isn't funny, Donnie..." He rotates slowly, looking around. "Okay, maybe the cartoon wasn't that funny... but this, seriously, is not funny."
He waits, but there's no answering laugh, no brother popping out of a hiding place, either with or without an obnoxious shout of "BOO!"
"Okay." Mike breathes in and out a few times. "Okay. In a sewer, alone, can't get out, can't go home. Just like a video game, right? Yeah. Just like a dungeon. I've beaten loads of dungeons." He looks around, twitchily. "Loads of dungeons. No big deal." He laughs nervously. "Yeah. No big deal. Just, like... what would Link do?" He looks around again. "Light some torches, or something."
It is abundantly clear that there are no torches in this sewer tunnel.
"Where's a dungeon map when you need one?" Mike mutters.
On the plus side, there don't seem to be any enemies here. There's no time limit, nothing shooting laser beams at him, and no spikes popping out of the floor.
In fact, it's not very much like a video game at all. It's just a sewer, and he's lost and alone in it.
So what are you gonna do about it?
He's going to go back to where he started. He's going to go back to where Leo left him, to where he should have stayed in the first place.
Donnie and his dumb ideas. They should have waited for Raph and Leo to come back, and then gone back to the first manhole.
Where did Donnie go, anyway?
Don has a habit of disappearing, of chasing off after shiny things and wild ideas, of getting caught up in a thought and forgetting to tell anybody where he's going. But Mike can't imagine what Don could have found so distracting down here, and he can't figure out how Don had zigged quickly enough to escape Mike's own sharp gaze.
Because he had totally, totally been paying attention.
And he totally remembers which way they had been walking.
"Yeah," he mumbles, and starts off in the direction that he is mostly, totally sure is the right one.
Southbound through Connecticut. Leo was already asleep, Raph was absorbed in listening to the Yankee game, and Don and Mike had been left to devise their own entertainment.
"Okay," Mike said. "I've got one."
Don shifted April's duffel bag aside, and rearranged his legs. "I'm ready."
"You're at the South Pole," Mike began.
"That seems unlikely," Don said, with one of his little smiles, "but all right."
"You're at the South Pole," Mike repeated. "You live there in a one-story house. The outside of the house is green. The inside of the house is green. The front door is -"
"Green," Don said. "And there are no stairs, and all the windows face north."
"Yeah, well, I wasn't gonna ask that," Mike said, scrambling quickly for what he was going to ask. "You look out one of your north windows and see a bear. What color is the bear?"
"That's the North Pole riddle," Don told him. "There are no bears at the South Pole."
"So what color is it?" Mike demanded.
"It's a ridiculous question," Don said.
"It's a riddle," Mike reminded him. "That's the point. Now, what color is the bear?"
"I have no idea," Don admitted.
"It's plaid," Mike said triumphantly.
Don gave him a look like he had lost his mind, and Raph did too, from his position behind April's seat. Leo's head lolled loosely as Casey changed lanes.
"It's a plaid bear," Mike repeated, pretty proud of himself for coming up with this on such short notice. "You're hallucinating, because it's the South Pole and you're, like, thirty seconds from freezing to death."
Raph snorted and went back to listening to his game.
"All right, smartypants," Don said. "My turn." He cleared his throat and contemplated the roof of the van for a moment. "You're walking down a road and you come to a fork. At the fork are two people. One of them always tells the truth and the other -"
"Gimme a break," Mike interrupted. "I've heard that one a million times."
"This one is different," Don said patiently, and resumed his story. "One of them always tells the truth and the other always tells lies. You want to know which way you should go, but you don't know where any of the roads lead."
"I ask one of them which way the other one would say I should go," Mike said, in the flat tone of extreme boredom.
Don smiled one of his smiles that meant he thought he had outsmarted someone. "Neither of them will answer any questions about what the other one would say."
"What?" Mike protested. "That's always the solution!"
Don crossed his arms in satisfaction, and waited.
"All right," Mike said, after thinking furiously for a minute. "I ask one of the people what two plus two is. Then I know which of them tells the truth, and then I ask him which way I should go."
"You can only ask one question," Don informed him.
"You're a sadist," Mike replied.
"I know."
Don posed the question somewhere around Meriden, and let Mike stew on it all the way to the bottom of 91, before suddenly querying him about the desirability of personal flying contraptions.
"What, like, for us to have?" Mike asked.
Don nodded.
"Are you joking?"
Don shook his head.
"I love you."
Don smiled one of his smiles that meant that he was going to do a lot of hard work, and it was going to be worth it.
"So what the hell am I supposed to ask?" Mike says out loud.
No one answers.
Don frowns, trying to figure out where Mike has gone.
Then he realizes, he's the one who's gone.
This is not the tunnel he was in a minute ago.
This seems to violate the laws of time and space, and he finds it puzzling and irritating.
Not that he hasn't violated natural laws before (he's probably breaking a lot of them just by existing), but he can't help feeling a little nervous every time he crosses into that space where Newton, Einstein, and Euclid aren't towering over him, standing on the shoulders of the giants that keep the crushing weight of chaos and entropy at bay.
Chaos and entropy are among his least favorite things, along with lima beans, toe lint, and the certain knowledge that somebody has messed with his tools and then put them back in exactly the same place, in the ridiculous hope that he won't notice the aura of defilement that lingers around his workspace.
He always notices. It's like he has a sixth sense, that picks up disturbances in the magnetic fields, intrusions of polarities not his own. But certain Turtles, for example, the ones who might be pseudonymically called "Shmaphael" and "Shmichelangelo", keep thinking they can get away with it.
And, to a certain way of thinking, they do get away with it. A calm "Please stay out of my lab" and an occasional refusal to immediately fix broken video game systems and wrecked motorcycles does not seem to make any impression on them whatsoever.
Maybe he should learn to be meaner.
Or maybe he should return to solving the problem of where he is, and how to get back to where he should be.
The difficulty with sewer tunnels is that they all look pretty much alike. The people who planned and built them, while they may have had a brilliant talent for designing systems to efficiently channel and move wastewater, were unfortunately devoid of imagination. There are a few distinctive places. Other than that, the key to knowing where you are, when you're underground, is to keep track of where you've been, the pattern of progression from point A to point B.
Which fails utterly when you suddenly find yourself dumped in a completely different place from where you were a minute ago.
The place Donatello now finds himself in is a five-way junction, with nothing to mark either the hub or any of the spokes. Is it the junction near the east end of Chinatown? Is it the junction at 59th Street? Is it a junction uptown, that he's never crossed through before?
Which way is North?
Sometimes, he wishes he really did have a magnetic sense.
The water is flowing here, coming in from four of the tunnels and exiting through the fifth. If he follows the current, it will probably lead him to the edge of the island, to a place where he can look out and see where he is.
He really hopes the current is flowing crosswise, and not along Manhattan's long axis, but he seriously doubts that his luck will run that way. From many years living in the sewers, looking at maps of them, moving through the three-dimensional reality of them, he has learned that systems designed for the efficient transport of water do not always allow for the efficient transport of Turtles.
He starts walking.
