Chapter 9 - Clay and Chaos
"You wanna tell me why we're here again?" Raph asked as he set two small containers of glaze on the table.
"I thought you enjoyed this class yesterday." Leo objected.
"No," Raph corrected him. "That was Mikey."
"Hey, how can you not enjoy this? Yesterday was playing in the dirt, and today we get to paint!" Mikey poured a dollop of orange glaze onto a palette and picked out one of the larger brushes to attack his vase with. "Well, except you, Leo. You play in the dirt today."
"Well, someone enjoyed it." Leo plopped some clay down on his pottery wheel. The teacher scowled at him for the inordinate amount of force he used in doing so. He grinned sheepishly as the man walked by. "It's better than what was listed on my schedule."
"I'll give you that." Raph agreed, recalling the 'literature' lesson from the previous day. He turned his attention back to the bowl in front of him when he caught a disapproving glare from the teacher.
The rest of the class was spent in near silence while Raphael and Michelangelo carefully painted their pieces and Leonardo worked on shaping the clay into what looked like a half decent cup.
"Might as well make something useful, right?" Leo defended himself at the odd look Mikey gave his piece just before class ended.
"You're a real kill-joy, you know that?" Mike responded with a smile, not caring that Leo had just insulted his flower vase. They left their work in the room for firing overnight and headed out to the next class.
Up to now, no one had taken much notice of the Turtles when they went into their classes, once they were sure that they weren't gairen that is. This one was different.
"Leo, why is everyone staring?" Raphael asked quietly.
"I don't know. Just act like everything is normal." Leonardo responded under his breath.
The three turtles took a seat near the back door of the room.
The lecturer, a strange and very crimson tripedal being, seemed nervous as he put all sorts of information up on the board and projected yet more on the walls. Leo wrote down everything on the board and thanked whatever powers that be for the handouts the teacher gave.
"Are you getting any of this?" Raphael asked quietly after noticing Leo's frantic note taking.
"No. You?"
"I was lost by the end of the first sentence." Raph responded quickly.
"Guys, the concept isn't that tough." Mike told his brothers, he was about to go into more detail when he caught a look from the lecturer and quickly shut up. Leonardo and Raphael shared astonished looks before Leo went back to his mad note taking. He didn't understand them, but Don might be able to make something of it.
When class was over, the lecturer called them to the front of the room.
"Which one of you is Donatello?" He asked much to Raph, Leo and Mikey's astonishment.
"He's somewhere else. I don't know what class he was assigned." Leo responded warily.
The answer seemed to be exactly what the lecturer wanted to hear. He let out a breath that he might have been holding for the entire class.
"Oh, ok. Well, thank you for attending." The tripod started to hurry away, but Raphael stopped him.
"Wait! Why did you want to know about Donnie?"
"Your friend-"
"Brother." Raph corrected.
The tripod blinked a few times, as if taking in the new information. "Your brother has been accepted into the engineering department. They are very particular, and… I shouldn't be telling you this." The being shut up and tried to leave again only to turn around and find Leonardo in his path.
"You have already started, please continue. We need to know what they're doing to Don." Leo begged.
The tripod just looked at Leo with a surprised expression on its face. It checked behind itself to see Raph and Mikey had also moved. They now had him triangled in. It was pretty apparent that they weren't going to let him go anywhere until after they had some answers. Also, the three pronged things in the red-masked turtle's belt looked pretty intimidating.
With a sigh, the red tripod started speaking again. "The engineers, they are very particular about those they accept into their program."
"Yes. That much, we have heard." Raphael snipped. He smirked a little when the tripod cringed.
"Yes, yes, well." The turtles had flustered the poor tripedal being and he was having a little trouble getting the whole sentence out. Especially since he was pretty sure they weren't going to like what he had to say. All he could do was hope that they didn't kill the messenger. He had heard that these creatures were not the gairen they appeared to be, but their presence was just as intimidating if not more so. "They are also possessive of those they allow in. They don't want them working on anything else, working with anyone else, or even associating with anyone else. Often they are pulled away from their families over the course of their first year in the program."
"We'd better not be here that long then." Leo responded, more to himself and his family than to the chaos teacher.
"They control their minds, there's nothing you can do. He's theirs now!" The tripod sounded sorry, but insistent. It was as if he had lost someone to the fate he expected Don to find. "That's always what happens. It doesn't matter how hard they fight against it! They have that goo. The microbes that make it up control the mind and the engineers control the microbes. There is no escape and nothing you can do, nothing that anyone has ever been able to do."
"They haven't messed with us before." Leo's voice was barely more than a whisper, but it had quite an effect on the tripod. The thing almost looked hopeful.
"Well, for your sake, and for the sake of everyone who has ever lost a family member to the engineers, I do hope that you are correct."
Leo nodded and stepped aside, allowing the tripedal being to leave. He then turned to his brothers "Well, only one class left, right?"
"Yup, our favorite one," Raph grouched, "kvilethiacianux"
They started to leave the lecture hall, when Raph remembered a comment Mikey had made.
"What did you mean by 'the concept isn't that tough'? Chaos is bizarre, Mikey!" Raph demanded of his brother.
Mikey shook his head. "The idea is totally simple! There's random and there's chaos. Random has no order. Chaos seems random, but it's not. Its structure just isn't in the first place you'd look for it."
Raph and Leo could only stare at their brother for a moment, shocked. This was Mikey, right?
"So, how do you find that structure? And is it enough to get us home?" Leo finally asked.
Mikey just shrugged. "How should I know? All I said was that the concept isn't tough. I never said I understood anything else." He left two still surprised brothers in his wake as he made his way down the hall to kvilethiacianux.
