"No," Donatello explained and then, finding that he couldn't think of any suitable words to go with it, he decided that he ought to at least repeat if he hoped to clear up any confusion surrounding the issue, "No."
Seeing that nobody seemed to have heard him, he decided that maybe he ought to shout it. As this seemed unable to properly convey his true feelings about it, he tried to improve it by adding a universal expletive on as a prefix to the original explanation. It didn't help at all.
The problem was this: He wasn't actually explaining anything to anyone because there was nobody there to explain it to, nor indeed anything present to be explained. This could account for why he couldn't seem to think of any other words to put with the one he'd got, which certainly wasn't going to help him win at scrabble. It also wouldn't impress any of those writers who publish books about setting boundaries and making sure other people don't take improper advantage of you, because he wasn't saying 'No' fiercely enough to stop the thing he was saying No to from doing what it was doing (which was, chiefly speaking, not being present).
The thing that was obstinately absent from the situation was the device the Kraang had been mucking about with that Don assumed had something to do with how he had come to be transported to this wretched hive of scum and villainy (Remember: the only people he had actually met here had first attacked him, then imprisoned him, and finally set loose a hell-beast by way of ignoring his warnings; unless you count the fish he ate as a person, in which case those people had also tried to bite him).
Don had spent the better part of two days marching from one cavern to another, steadfastly refusing to enjoy the scenery or anything else he happened to cross paths with (which was nothing, because he avoided obvious paths where possible), and finally he had arrived at the cavern he wanted (it had taken so long because he had fallen down the shaft, which meant he'd had to go a lot farther just to get back to where he'd started than he'd had to in order to get away from it in the first place) and found to his intense chagrin... nothing. Precisely and exactly nothing.
Because the spot was rather exposed, Don had left his Mecha, trailer and most of the slugs in a nearby canyon, taking only a handful of them and his blaster. As he had already explained the situation to them, they felt no need to listen to him explain it again to the nobody he was explaining it to.
He made one last, desperate attempt to explain his feelings on the subject.
"No!" he shouted.
And then he gave up and wondered if maybe it was alright for boys to cry after all, in spite of all that had been written on the subject and also told to every boy by every other boy he ever met and very often his father as well. He decided that all the boys and fathers could stick it in their ear and cried.
Somehow, without ever firing a shot or at least having been killed, he had been utterly, totally, completely, fully, thoroughly... well, you get the picture... defeated.
He had nothing else. His every hope had ridden on this one thing, the only thing, that could get him back home. And now it was gone. Taken? Destroyed? Did it even matter at this point?
There were 99 Caverns. It would take an entire lifetime to explore all of them thoroughly enough to be assured that the thing he was looking for was not in any of them. He was already fifteen, and therefore a certain percentage of his lifetime had already come and gone, making it fully impossible to ever search all of the caverns, unless by some stroke of magic he became immortal.
His dreams hadn't really been very big. Nothing to get too excited over. All he wanted in the world was to save New York from the criminal element that infested it and to get a very wonderful and extremely pretty girl to fall in love with him. Those dreams weren't all that special. But for all that they were his.
And now... now they were gone.
"No?" he inquired of a nearby rock face, but it merely glowered at him in a way that suggested it thought that he should just move along because there wasn't anything to see here.
Leader clambered up out of his shell and made his way onto Don's shoulder. With a small appendage he patted the side of Don's face, then leaned against Don's head. Leader was a very simple creature, and didn't know anything about New York, saving the world, or pretty girls. But he did know that the turtle which had saved him from a life of torment (or a death by way of being eaten), was in a severe sort of mental distress, the likes of which you most often see behind glass in rooms with padded walls.
"Coo," Leader explained, "Eeeh. Eeh. Mmm... coo."
These were not real words, even to a slug, but they were the sort of thing that slugs said when they encountered immeasurable sadness and wanted to diminish it so that it could be properly measured just like everything else, but didn't know how to do that. They didn't help.
Don was still very alone. The hive was no less full villainy, nor was their any discernible change in the level of its wretchedness. The object which should have been there stubbornly persisted in not being there. The dreams, such as they were, still lay shattered on the floor of Don's mind.
The broom of Don's mind was trying to sweep them up, but really wasn't very enthusiastic about it and kept pausing in its work to wonder if there was really a point to any of this. It finally decided there wasn't and evaporated into a cloud of apathy. The dreams stayed on the floor where they belonged, while the apathetic broom cloud drifted about where it didn't belong.
"Coo," Leader repeated, and added a reassuring chirp for good measure.
It didn't do anybody any good, least of all the broom.
"No," Eli didn't so much use this as an explanation as the sort of thing one says just before passing out from lack of oxygen to the brain as the result of it having been entirely knocked from one's lungs by a sight so horrifying that in the future one's nightmares would have nightmares about it.
Trixie was considerably less articulate, and only managed the squeaky beginnings of a scream which was cut off by the same thing that had caused Eli to speak as he had. Kord managed to say even less, by virtue of his having exhaled just before seeing the sight which would have robbed him of oxygen if only he'd had any. Leo and Mikey said nothing at all.
What they were looking at was a town. Or rather, the charred remains of what had been a town.
Back at the abandoned ghouling facility, after they had cured the slugs and Eli had disembarked from the chandelier, Pronto had told them about the slime trail he'd been following when the ghouls accosted his person. He used more words than necessary, but most storytellers do.
His audience managed to get the gist of it anyway.
Being the tracker that he was (or thought he was, it was never really clear), Pronto said that the trail was almost certainly made by the beast which must have been produced when the person, slug or other entity came in contact with the mutagen. Eli and Leo were both adamant that it must be followed, immediately if not sooner. There was no time to waste, they set off at once (which is as near to immediately as makes no difference, so they were satisfied that it was soon enough).
And then they proceeded to meander in hopeless circles because the thing they were tracking did not appear to go much of anywhere in a straight line. Along the way, they couldn't help but notice the conspicuous lack of slugs in the areas they visited, or the fact that they were occasionally set upon by ghoul packs that -while every bit as coordinated as the ones at the facility- were in fairly small numbers and were thus reasonably easy to disable and cure whenever Doc was up to it.
At last they had come to what had been a town. But the buildings were burned. There were few people, and fewer slugs. Most of the survivors huddled in groups, weeping and babbling incoherently about someone they knew who had been eaten by "The Demon Ghoul" (as ghouls could really only ever be called ghouls, so too was it fully impossible to call the Demon Ghoul by any other name; though the fact is that nobody would ever want to call it at all).
There was nothing The Shane Gang or turtles could do for these people. Doc was exhausted and couldn't heal their hurts, most especially the mental and emotional anguish. The people couldn't say anything useful, describing the Demon Ghoul only as huge, monstrous, with evil glowing eyes and fire spewing out of its mouth and burning everything and almost everyone to the ground.
In silence, they moved on.
Though there are 99 Caverns, that doesn't mean that there are only 99 towns. Many of the larger caverns had multiple towns, and this one was no exception. The strange thing was that the next town down the road was completely untouched, while the one after that lay in ruins.
While the Shane Gang were hit by shock and horror to such a degree that thinking about anything other than finding and stopping the Demon Ghoul was impossible, Leo was able to be more objective.
The Demon Ghoul had no need to hide, and thus no reason to avoid the road. Since the road was the easiest way to travel, it had even less reason to avoid it. And yet, that surely must be what it had done, otherwise why wouldn't it have destroyed every town it came across? There was no reason to suspect one town was any less offensive to it than another.
The only reason it would be progressing in the manner it obviously had been was if it was following someone who was avoiding the towns. Someone who knew how to move unseen. Someone who didn't know the layout of the caverns, and so could only judge the best route by looking. Leo knew it was a long shot, but he was suddenly completely certain that the Demon Ghoul was following one of his brothers. Since Don had been closest to the Kraang (and thus the mutagen) when whatever happened occurred, it seemed likely that he was the one being pursued.
Leo didn't say any of this aloud. It was too far-fetched to get anyone's hopes up. Or, if we're being honest, to get Mikey's hopes up. Leo wasn't sure whether to be hopeful that he was right, or that he was wrong. Each had its own pros and cons.
This theory seemed to be very much in error when the slime trail eventually meandered back to the cavern where it had started, then wound its way towards a different exit.
It was at this moment that Mikey decided to do one of his infamous left turns when a right turn is warranted, and promptly walked both himself and Leo -riding atop their Mecha Beast- into a hole.
"Are you guys okay?" Eli yelled down the shaft.
"We're good!" Leo shouted back up it, though he wasn't actually sure that was true because his body hadn't had time to process all the things it had bounced off of, much less assign blame to certain regions for the pain that seemed to be flitting in and out like an indecisive moth in a doorway.
"Want us to come down?"
"Uh... no, I don't think so. Can you get us back up?"
"Well no. That's why I suggested we come to you," Eli replied.
Leo put this in the queue of things for his mind to look into, but it was presently trying to decide whether or not he had actually sprained his right elbow and couldn't be bothered.
"Uh... Leo?" Mikey was using that voice again.
Reluctantly, Leo looked over at where Mikey had landed on his back. Mikey was still on his back, but he was holding something in his hand that he'd picked up off the ground. It was a shuriken. Not just any shuriken though. The turtles made their own shurikens, each in his own unique style. Though essentially all the same, there were subtle differences that allowed each turtle to readily identify his own shurikens from those of his brothers.
It was Don's, and it didn't appear to have been used for anything, merely lost.
"You suppose D turned right when he should have gone left?" Mikey wondered.
"You turned left when you should have been turning right," Leo reminded him, "But yes, I think Donnie wound up down here," he paused momentarily to consider his previous sentence, and decided it wasn't worth correcting, "Which means... well, I don't actually know what it means."
His mind decided it was just a bruise he'd gotten after all, and decided that it was time to think of something else for awhile, to sort of relax and get back into the swing of things, return to the problem of injury identification later when it had had a nice rest.
"Hey guys!" Leo called up to the Shane Gang, "We think one of our brothers might be down here. We're going to look for him. You guys keep following the Demon Ghoul!"
"Okay," Eli sounded reluctant, "When you get done, your Mecha has a map feature built into it. Remember though, the maps don't have everything on them, there will be passages that won't show on your map which may or may not be shortcuts. Be careful."
"Dude!" Mikey shouted up the shaft, "We're always careful!"
"That's what I'm afraid of," Eli said, but not loudly enough to be heard down the hole.
Raph didn't attempt to explain anything to anyone.
In one savage moment, all reason had been stripped from him and all he could do was narrow his eyes, growl and launch himself bodily at the thing that had done the stripping.
The Demon Ghoul was a truly maddening sight, but that wasn't what had made Raph so angry. What had so deeply inflamed the powerful anger on which he typically ran was the sight of what the thing had on one of its stupidly long tail spikes.
A Bo Staff. Not just any Bo Staff. The one belonging to Raph's brother, Don.
The Demon Ghoul brushed Raph back with a dismissive wave of its paw, missing him with its claws only because he twisted in the air, flipped over and managed a perfectly movie ready three-point landing, still snarling inarticulately at the Demon Ghoul.
For a moment, Raph's eyes blazed with a hatred that conveyed a passionate loathing for absolutely everything in the known universe. The hatred quickly realized that it had spread itself much too thin and decided to converge upon a single point in time and space. Now and roughly fifty feet from here, which was where the Demon Ghoul was slouching in a carelessly spiteful way.
The Demon Ghoul was much more articulate in its growling. Its eyes blazed, and its hatred was much more thickly spread over everything in the known universe, most particularly anything that it could see, which included the turtle fifty feet in front of it.
Raph's mind scrambled itself, attempting to locate his vocabulary in a desperate bid to retrieve his reasonable side from the deep black pit into which it had flung itself on seeing the Demon Ghoul's souvenir. But it could only find one word, and that only made the fury which was rapidly building a cover for the pit with bricks that much stronger. Strong enough that Raph took action.
Kill.
It wasn't a very useful word, and not one Raph often used, even in scrabble. But, for the moment, it was the only one he had, and he already knew exactly how to apply it. Lunging thoughtlessly for the Demon Ghoul's head, he attempted to apply it to the creature's brain via his sai, but it brushed him back like he was an irritating fly. It then attempted to crush him as if he was an irritating fly. Like an irritating fly, he dodged just as the blow hit where he'd been standing.
The Demon Ghoul threw back its head as though summoning the wrath of thunder and lightning. Then, evidently remembering that it was not the God of Thunder, it turned its head down to look sharply at Raph, crouching just beyond easy reach.
It opened its mouth. A flap on the roof of its mouth opened, effectively closing off its throat and opening up a different passage along the same lines. It huffed in the way a dragon would when blowing fire at an errant night. Only it didn't spit flames. Rather, it spewed ghouls.
A volley of shrieking, flailing ghouls winging their way absurdly through the air is a truly terrible sight. To see them exiting the cavernous maw of a Demon Ghoul is worse. And to witness them reaching velocity and spinning into larger, more deadly beasts is the absolute worst. Just the worst.
Raph growled at the onslaught, and prepared to meet Fate, kick Fate in the teeth and stomp up and down on Fate's head.
Raph simply had no respect for the inevitable.