Hey guys, another update for you (I'm still bedridden, so I actually managed to get this one out fast, lacking the ability to do anything else). I'm basing as much as I can off research here, but I'm also taking a LOT of liberties with the AMNH, so if anybody out there feels the need to correct anything, I probably already know. Chalk it up to artistic license. :o) Dan's shirt originally said "I 8 pi (and it was delicious)", but ff .net can't handle the pi symbol, and the joke doesn't really work without it.

History Bites: Act One, Part 1

April supposed that she suffered from the problem that many New Yorkers did; living in a city that contained some of the greatest institutions, museums, and tourist attractions in the world, she never actually bothered to visit any of them. She had some vague memories of visiting the Museum of Natural History with her dad when she was younger, but they hadn't been in a long, long time. So when her class had arrived at the building, with its towering façade facing Central Park flanked by dinosaur topiary cut in honour of the special dinosaur exhibition on the fourth floor, even her jaded city girl self had to admit to being impressed.

Even more impressive was the massive mechanical Tyrannosaurus that greeted them as they entered the building. It had been carefully cordoned off from the public, probably to avoid lawsuits should some enthusiastic little one get under its massive feet, but the animatronic dinosaur lumbered around the atrium in a frighteningly lifelike manner. The enthusiastic scientists controlling it happily explained to anyone who would stand still long enough to listen that new research coming out of the exhibition upstairs, coupled with new advances in robotics technology, had allowed them to recreate the Cretaceous giant's movements in a more lifelike way than had ever been seen before. Then they had lapsed into an argument about their model's accuracy, and whether or not the pebbled skin covering the animatronic giant should have had feathers.

April sighed. She wished she could have stayed downstairs for that argument. But then their escort had arrived to take them behind-the-scenes to for the real purpose behind their field trip, and their guide on this leg of the tour wasn't nearly so interesting. April found her mind drifting more often than Mikey's did, which was a truly scary thought. Frowning, she closed her eyes. Using the visualization techniques Splinter had been teaching her, she tried to remind herself why this trip in particular was so important.

Despite the weeks she had been training as a kunoichi, Splinter still insisted that at least one of the boys walk her home at night. It should have annoyed her, but April suspected it had more to do with Splinter's traditional upbringing than with a judgment on her competence. And she didn't mind that much. It meant more time with the guys, and less time alone, which was what she needed these days.

Since Raph and Mikey were still busy sparring, and Leo had been called up to face off with Splinter, it had fallen to Donnie to accompany her. As they took to the rooftops, putting her new skills to the test, she took a moment to appreciate how clear the sky was.

"Look," she said, pointing up. "You can actually see Orion."

Donnie looked up and grinned. "The middle star on his sword is actually a nebula, you know."

"Hey," she hitched a thumb at herself, "scientist's daughter. I knew that before I knew my alphabet." She pointed at a bright star toward the south. "I can't remember what that one is, though."

He moved to stand behind her so that he could better follow the sightline of her arm, his plastron pressing lightly against her back. "Oh, that's Sirius."

"Really?" she said. "I thought it was joking." It was a stupid geek joke, one her dad had told so many times that repeating it was automatic by now, but Donnie responded with a snort of laughter. She couldn't help grinning. There weren't very many people she knew other than her dad who would have appreciated it. Laughing, April vaulted the next gap to land on her aunt's rooftop. "Thanks for your help today."

"Don't worry about it," Donnie said as he landed next to her. "Do you think you're ready for your trip tomorrow?"

"I'd better be," she said as she sprinted across the roof. "Mr. Nelson has been going on about this for weeks."

"I'm so jealous!" He pulled up next to her, staring dreamily into the distance. "I can't believe you actually get to see the mastodon mummy they found! And ask questions!"

"Hey, if I could trade places with you, I would," she said, and instantly froze as the glee left his face. "Oh, Donnie, I wasn't thinking—I'm sorry."

He smiled at her and shook his head. "It's okay. I know what you meant." He jumped down to her fire escape and held up his hands. She could make the jump on her own at this point and they both knew it, but they'd been doing it this way long enough that she took comfort in the routine of it, and he knew her well enough to know that, too. She let herself fall from the roof, finally able to enjoy the few seconds of freefall before Donnie caught her around the waist and set her on her feet.

"I'll take lots of notes for you," she said. "I promise. And pictures!"

He raised a brow. "Do they let you take pictures of that kind of thing?"

She planted a hand on her hip and grinned. "Hey, if I'm not good enough to take a picture of a mummy for my friend without getting caught, what kind of kunoichi am I?"

Donnie giggled, clutching his fists beneath his chin. "You are so cool!"

"Yeah," she said, examining her fingernails. "I know." She pulled open her window and turned back to him, opening her arms. "Night, Donnie."

He stepped forward, wrapping his arms around her and hugging her tightly. "G'night, April." Letting go of her reluctantly, he smiled at her for a moment before he vaulted back up to the roof. He turned to wave once he reached the top. "See you tomorrow?"

She returned the wave. "Count on it!"

And with that, he was gone back into the night. Her smile faded a little as she hoisted herself through the window. She could have kicked herself for the stupid mistake she'd made. Of course he couldn't trade places with her. The one person out of everyone she knew who most wanted to go on this field trip tomorrow was the one person who could never actually do so.

As she opened her closet and dug for her pyjamas, pausing to pull Titian down from the Titian Cave for a good-night kiss – it was childish, she knew, but she did it to keep the nightmares away, and so far it was working – she resolved that she would be the most attentive student in the world on that trip tomorrow. If Donnie couldn't be there, she would be his eyes and ears instead.

April opened her eyes again. She was trying. She really was. But this guy was just so...boring.

It was kind of amazing, really. Their teacher had managed to get their class a look at the mastodon mummy that the museum's research team had just excavated from a glacier, which was so well-preserved that all the science news outlets were buzzing about the possibility of cloning a real mastodon. How you could make that boring was beyond April's comprehension, but this guy managed it.

Steve, as he had introduced himself, was a graduate student working for the Sackler Genomics Institute. And he clearly wished he was somewhere else as much as the rest of the class did. "And by using modern phylogenetic techniques with the DNA samples obtained from the specimen," he said, never breaking his monotone, "we can establish a more accurate cladogram for the relationship for the Proboscidea—"

April, who had been hiding her phone behind one of her classmates as she texted what she could follow to the eager turtle on the other end, held up her free hand as she read the incoming message.

Steve broke off his drawl, looking immensely insulted. April had figured him out pretty quickly. He was really smart, but unlike Donnie, who changed how he explained things until you understood it because he genuinely wanted you to appreciate science as much as he did, Steve liked feeling smarter than everybody else and deliberately used the most complicated explanations possible to make himself feel better. The fact that a graduate student needed to talk down to a bunch of high school kids to feel good about himself made her dislike him instantly, and the fact that she kept interrupting him to ask questions had pretty much ensured that the feeling was mutual. "Yes?"

"How does the institute account for the degradation of genetic material when performing the sequencing?" she asked, actually interested in the answer even if the question had come from Donnie. His help with her essay last night was paying off in a lot of unexpected ways, though she was trying not to take too much pleasure in the fact that she kept throwing Steve off his game.

Steve stared at her, adjusting the tie that she was fairly sure was not actually required dress code for a grad student. "The mastodon was frozen," he said, as though talking to a six year old. "That means it's preserved."

"Well yeah," said April, "but even frozen DNA begins to degrade after a few thousand years, and you've dated this mummy at over 50,000 years old."

Behind her, Mr. Nelson made an approving noise and made a note on his tablet.

Steve rolled his eyes. "It's a complicated process, well beyond your ability to understand," he said.

April made a face at him, surreptitiously angling herself so that she could get a clear shot of the mummy with her phone.

"No pictures!"

April jumped at his shout, but it wasn't directed at her. Steve was yelling at Brandon, the photographer for their school paper. April had worked with him a lot the year before, and knew that he didn't do well with being yelled at. He lowered his camera with a stricken expression on his face, and April leaned over as Steve started to drone on again. "Don't worry," she whispered. "If you don't have a clear shot, I've got a bunch."

Brandon shot her a grateful look, and April smiled at him.

"Now, we've got a lot of work to do," said Steve, adjusting the lab coat he wore over his clothes, "if you have any other questions, I can provide you with some research material on your way out."

Mr. Nelson started in surprise. "But we arranged to have the entire afternoon to discuss the mummy."

"We're much too busy for that." Steve waved a hand. "It's a big museum. Surely these children can entertain themselves for a few hours." Anything else he might have said was forestalled by the paper airplane made out of a museum map that hit him in the back of the head; April was fairly certain it had come from Josh's direction. "Ow!" Steve turned, enraged. "What was that?"

"Children entertaining themselves," Mr. Nelson said flatly. "Come on, kids."

Nobody was particularly happy as they were escorted back to the public part of the museum. Mr. Nelson assigned them a time to meet back at the main entrance, with specific instructions to learn at least one new thing under threat of a pop quiz, before he took off after Josh and his friends in an attempt to keep them from completely embarrassing the school; on their trip to the Museum of Modern Art, the boys had gotten the entire class thrown out of the building on account of their behavior toward the anatomically correct artwork.

Sighing, April headed back up to the fourth floor to check out the museum's mastodon skeleton. If the mummy part of the trip was a wash, as least she could try to get some good reference shots for Donnie. When she arrived there, she discovered that Brandon had had the same idea. He wasn't having much luck, though, as a man and a woman wearing museum IDs were inside the display, carefully measuring the mastodon's foot bones with a pair of calipers.

"So any idea what you're going to call this article?" April asked.

Brandon grimaced. "Mastodon misfortune?" He thought about it a minute. "Or maybe 'Blowhard Blues?'"

A snort of laughter from inside the display drew their attention, and April found the two museum staff looking at them. "Let me guess," said the woman, pushing her dark hair behind her ears. "You're part of the class that had the delightful experience of a lecture from Steve 'my thesis is more important than yours' Kirkland?"

April grinned. "So it wasn't just us?"

The other scientist laughed. "Nope. If it isn't about Steve Kirkland, it's not worth his time." He beamed at them, his jeans and flannel over a 'Got DNA?' t-shirt providing a stark contrast to Steve. "I'm Dan, and this is Parminder. We have the misfortune of being students in the same lab."

Parminder put her calipers away. "If you kids have any questions that Mr. Personality didn't cover, we'd be happy to answer them for you."

Brandon and April exchanged a look. Grinning, April pulled out her phone.

As they headed out of the subway, Mr. Nelson still lecturing Josh and his friend Alex on respecting other cultures and not making fun of the museum displays – a lecture that had been ongoing since they left the museum – April gave a little sigh of satisfaction. Brandon had gotten tired of the science lecture pretty early and left to take pictures of the rest of the museum, but Dan and Parminder had been kind, and funny, and had let Brandon and April climb inside the display to take their pictures with the mastodon skeleton, and had been totally cool with letting April call Donnie after Brandon left so he could talk to the scientists directly. She'd even convinced Brandon to let her write the article to go with his photos. All in all, it had been a pretty good day.

"So, did you get all the shots you wanted?" April asked Brandon as they headed back toward the school.

Brandon grimaced, scrolling through photos on his camera's display. "They could have been better. This one guy kept photobombing all my shots. I don't know how he managed it, but that dude was everywhere."

A cold feeling ran through April. "Lemme see that!" She reached out and yanked on Brandon's camera until she could see the screen, only dimly registering his strangled gasp of protest as the camera's neck strap dragged him toward her. Frantically, she scrolled through his photos, but he was right. There was one face that kept showing up, over and over. But it wasn't because the same guy was everywhere. She knew that face. It had been haunting her nightmares for months.

She let go of the camera and sprinted back toward the subway, pulling out her phone as she ran. Behind her, a gasping Brandon called out, "Where are you going? We still have final attendance!"

"Tell him an emergency came up!" she called back. Typing frantically, she had time to send off one text before she plunged back underground.

Leo sighed and turned off the TV. Between the noise of Raph and Mikey continuing to practice in the pit despite there being a perfectly functional dojo just a room away, and Donnie still waxing on about the stupid mastodon, there was no point in trying to watch this episode of Space Heroes. Just as well, he supposed; it was one of the episodes during the half-season when they'd written Lieutenant Virtue out of the show, before the backlash from the fans brought her back, and while he would never admit that there was a bad episode of Space Heroes, her replacement on the show just wasn't the same, and those episodes just seemed to be...missing something.

"And then," Donnie said, waving the gadget he'd been tinkering with most of the day, "they said that the rapid freezing that the mastodon must have undergone has led to an unprecedented level of tissue preservation!"

"Wow," Raph said, attempting unsuccessfully to sweep Mikey's leg. "Imagine what my face would look like if I actually cared."

"Oh, come on!" Donnie paused to make an adjustment to his newest invention, which he claimed was a master controller that would revolutionize their gaming platforms, to Mikey's delight. Half the reason Raph was still sparring with Mikey was to get him to leave Donnie alone long enough to actually finish it. "This could teach us all kind of awesome stuff about an animal that just doesn't exist on the planet anymore. Like what they ate, or how smart they were—"

"How smart could it be if it got flash-frozen in a glacier?" This time, Raph succeeded in knocking Mikey down.

"Hey, not bad!" Mikey flipped himself back to his feet. "And it only took you half a day!"

Donnie glared at Raph. "Some catastrophic climactic events came on really fast," he protested. "It wasn't the mastodon's fault." His Tphone beeped, and his irritated expression instantly vanished. "That's April," he said, transferring his gadget to one hand so he could read the message. "I wonder if she has any more pictures—"

The controller fell from his hand, smashing into a dozen pieces on the floor. The others instantly froze, all eyes turned to Donatello, who stood clutching his Tphone in both hands, staring at the screen.

"Donnie?" Leo stepped forward, reaching for his brother. "What's wrong?"

"April." Donnie turned to Leo, his eyes wide with fear. "She found the Kraang."