TSOTCTSOTC
Karai stood near Medusa; both women watching Donnie disassemble the cyborg. Was it a Kraangdroid? It didn't look like the same tech. What kind of human volunteered for an experiment that turned them into whatever she was? This was crazy even for them. From what she could tell the woman was both machine and human being. While part of Karai was in awe of the wires and veins working together to create some semblance of life she really wanted to do something to help. But healing and repair were under Phoenix and Donnie's talent scope, not hers.
Her phone vibrated at the same time Zoe seemed to glide between her and Medusa. Karai's chest constricted as she reached for the damned device. Everyone in her family was in this room, so unless Denim was calling this wasn't going to be good news. Since she was pretty sure Denim would call Mikey, not her, her teeth ground together as she stuck her hand in her pocket to silence it. Almost immediately it buzzed again.
Medusa's head tipped in her direction, shifting from the works happening on the table. Zoe appeared to be getting her empath on and Raph had stopped talking to watch when Donnie warned her she might get a jolt. She didn't, which was kind of anticlimactic, a zap might've done Zoe a little good.
As Karai silenced her phone again it started right over.
Damn it.
"Do you need to get that?" It could be difficult to read Medusa's expressions at times, but Karai new suspicion when she saw it. Double damn.
"Yeah, it might be one of the AFE volunteers." She feigned a smile, pulling her phone out. "I'll be right back." She backed away, turned and made her way into the hall.
The screen shown bright against the unlit hallway and it took her eyes a second to adjust. It was another video message. Those were the worst. They left her stomach churning and the hairs on her neck standing on end. This one was no exception. There was no audio, but a video that seemed like some edited version of the attack at the school. It jumped around to each family member as if… Shit.
It was like she was watching the fight through the eyes of their enemy… which meant, the bitch on the table might have information about whoever was harassing her. Where the EDF and AFH connected? She wheeled around, ready to march through the door when two things happened at once. One, she realized she had to be very careful what she said and how she went about it. No one could know about her stalker. And two, an annoying alarm of some sort began blaring from somewhere in Michelangelo's vicinity.
"What the hell is that racket?" she blurted out, rejoining her family.
From across the room Donatello and Michelangelo each seemed to pale as their eyes met. Mikey's mouth opened and closed while he made that ridiculous whining noise. All the while his phone began making the same irritating sound as the watch type thing around his wrist.
Donnie licked his lips and swallowed then slowly returned his attention to the cyborg. "It's Denim's alarm."
"Well shut the damn thing off," Raph snapped, reaching for Mikey's wrist.
"Wait!" Mikey shouted. "Wait, D, can't you track her with it, if she's wearing hers?"
Donnie frowned, not looking at Mikey as he answered. "Mikey, we can try, but if it just went off and hers is set that loud, whoever has her is doing to destroy it. Our best shot is still right here."
Then Mikey's mouth snapped shut, while Zoe lifted her fingers from the cyborg's body, announcing, "For what it's worth, I think we can trust her."
Karai watched as her sister's gray eyes set on the woman's face. "We might be made differently, but I don't think that what we want for ourselves varies by much." She turned away from the table, walked by Raph up to Mikey and put a hand on his arm. "I am so sorry, Mikey. I want you to know that." Then her hybrid sister walked right past him, swept by her, and went out the door Karai had just entered.
"What the- Zoe! I know that look!" Raph jogged past her next, following his mate.
Karai's jaw ached she was clenching so hard. What a damn mess. From kidnapping, to hybrid drama, to cyborg drama, to-
Leo's voice pierced her thoughts. "We need to talk."
TSOTCTSOTC
Sappho lay still, not that she had a choice, as she'd done many times before during upgrades and repairs at the EDF, incapacitated but still conscious each time. The EDF left her brain running to get feedback from it. As for her enemies, it probably was not a priority. It was fine. They were taking greater care not to cause her undue discomfort, interestingly enough. There wasn't any good reason why, beyond it simply being a fundamental difference between them and her creators.
Since most of her nervous system had been disconnected at that start of the procedure, she didn't have much of a sense of what was going on, but given the background she had on Donatello, he should be more than competent at repairing or dismantling her, depending on what his goal was. All she could do was stare at the ceiling with unmovable eyes, catching occasional glimpses of the limbs of anyone who moved into her field of vision.
Out of her peripheral vision she could just make out the edge of Arcos's arm. He hadn't left her side since arriving. Though she wasn't sure why, she found that knowledge inspired a warm sensation that somehow suffused her, despite her having no sensory means of detecting the feeling. But it was pleasant nonetheless. And she took comfort in his presence. No matter what was being done to her, she found that she could endure it better with him there. As he had in the faded, broken memories of the girl who'd died in the fire, he made her feel safe, even if she was completely at the mercy of people who had no reason not to hate her.
And then Zoe's face filled her field of vision, the hybrid's hand reaching for her face. An unfamiliar pulling sensation followed the physical contact, as though something were being tugged out of her. She didn't understand. With her nervous system disabled, she shouldn't be able to feel anything. She hadn't felt the brush of Zoe's fingers on her forehead. Why could she feel this?
Whatever this new feeling was, she did not like it. It made her feel exposed, vulnerable. Not unlike when K2 had been prying into the inconsistencies in her behavior while she attempted to change her thoughts and feelings.
Unable to do anything to escape the sense of violation, she instinctively reached for the warm, safe feeling that Arcos inspired and imagined cloaking herself in it as though it could form some barrier or shield to protect her.
Then Zoe and the unpleasant experience were gone. She wasn't certain exactly what happened or why, but was glad that it was over. If she could have, she would have breathed a sigh of relief. What was all that about?
TSOTCTSOTC
Donatello worked with absolute focus, tuning out the rest of his family and defending against distracting inquiry with a continuous explanation of what he was doing that he doubted anyone understood. He trusted April to keep him supplied with the tools he required, her intuition able to inform her of what he needed, and his mother to mitigate any inadvertent damage to the woman's human tissue.
Thankfully, no one had bothered attempting to speak to him since he'd started and Anton had been the only one to ask anything.
"Is it going to hurt her?"
The scalpel in his hands stopped, hovering just over the cyborg's skull. "I highly doubt it. She was made to be a super soldier and while I'm sure she has the capability of knowing what I'm doing to her, but it doesn't make sense that her creators would want to risk her being debilitated by traditional pain."
Anton blinked at him. "So it's not going to hurt her then? You're sure?"
He frowned, wanting to reassure Anton, but not wanting to lie to him. He was relatively certain but not absolutely. "How's this? The first thing I'll do is disconnect her neural interface so that she won't be able to feel anything while I'm working on her. Then we'll know it won't hurt."
Anton considered that for a moment before nodding.
It had been fairly easy. While the cyborg's design was technically unique, it was still fundamentally Kraang technology, a field in which his knowledge could be considered comprehensive. All the wiring and even the neural link between the living brain and circuitry, despite being in the head instead of the chest, were essentially identical.
Fortunately, he had everything he needed with him, more by luck than planning. Since he only ever cleaned out his bag when it became too cumbersome to move around safely with, he typically had way more in both quantity and variety than he needed at any given time and it was paying off now in terms of tools and parts that could be adapted to replace the pieces ruined beyond repair.
Slicing open her forearm, he immediately pinned the skin back, having learned the hard way early on that if it wasn't held out of the way, the false skin would immediately reseal over any cut he made the moment the ends of the slice made contact. He'd just begun removing the fried wiring when Zoe pushed her way into his space.
"Zoe, be careful what you touch. There's exposed current near her heart, you could get shocked."
Unsurprisingly, she ignored him and proceeded to place her fingers on the cyborg's head. If she got shocked, it would be her own fault and he was sure his mother could handle it.
Shutting out Zoe's psychic reading, he turned his attention back to the cyborg's arm, the last limb to be repaired before he could try firing her up again and seeing how she worked. He'd gotten all of the bad wiring out and started installing replacement's when his phone alarm sound off, began vibrating at his belt at the same time Mikey's alarms began to blare, one on his phone and one built into his watch, in case he misplaced his phone as he was prone to doing. Damn. He'd been hoping to avoid this until he had something else to offer his little brother.
"What the hell is that racket?" Karai's voice set the inevitable in motion.
He reluctantly paused in his work to answer. "It's Denim's alarm." Maybe it would pass unnoticed and he could finish first. With that hope in mind, he turned his attention back to the cyborg. If the whole system weren't so interdependent, he could have merely fixed her head and neck and been done with it, but of course it couldn't be that simple.
"Well shut the damn thing off." Donnie could sense Raph moving towards Mikey as he spoke.
"Wait!" Mikey shouted, looking at him hopefully. "Wait, D, can't you track her with it, if she's wearing hers?"
He frowned, avoiding Mikey's eyes. "Mikey, we can try, but if it just went off and hers is set that loud, whoever has her is doing to destroy it. Our best shot is still right here."
He didn't have the heart to tell his brother that was the first thing he'd tried when Leo had called him. Unfortunately, their enemies were using a signal scrambler, not unlike the one he'd used to block the cyborg's transmissions. Denim was untraceable by phone, though her connection went in and out enough that they'd been getting delayed updates to her health monitor as data packets intermittently made it through. Good thing he'd built so much redundancy into that system.
He hadn't wanted to try anything too aggressive to follow the information back to a source for fear of revealing it to their enemies. Something that would have been demanded, had he brought it up himself. There'd been some comfort in knowing that Denim was alive and not in a state of severe physical distress, but that link was about to be gone leaving them with only the knowledge that her health was crashing. Damn. He needed to finish the cyborg fast.
Zoe's voice broke through his panicked efforts to finish, "For what it's worth, I think we can trust her. We might be made differently, but I don't think that what we want for ourselves varies by much."
He paid little heed as his sister moved away from the table. Time was running short now. No matter what he needed to get this done as soon as possible.
TSOTCTSOTC
Arcos watched as Donnie did his magic. He was nothing short of miraculous when he did this kind of thing. It really was awe inspiring. What the turtle was doing at the moment looked no less complicated than if he were performing surgery on a breathing, bleeding person. Only, this person wasn't bleeding, and was barely breathing.
"She's getting plenty of oxygen," Donnie assured him, annoyed when he brought it up. "She's in a sort of low power mode. I think."
'I think' hadn't made Arcos feel any better.
Why he needed to feel better, he wasn't entirely sure. For some reason, what happened to this cyborg mattered. More than just finding Denim and Alli. It mattered because of that sense of familiarity he was hit with when he first fought with her, raked his claws over her torso. It hit him again when he saw her on the ground at the school, surrounded by debris. But, for the life of him, he could not remember where he knew her from.
He didn't know many humans at all, not enough to find one truly familiar. His roommates, former roommates, he reminded himself, perhaps. Or Jennifer. His chest seized so that he gasped a little, blinking rapidly.
Donnie looked up, a look of concern on his face, but then immediately turned back to the cyborg, April handing him a thin instrument that resembled a pair of tweezers.
Arcos stroked her long, golden hair, that looked very much like sunlight shining off her head. She turned to look at him, her big blue eyes smiling. "You know, Arcos," she said, "maybe we should skip dinner with your family tonight."
Arcos laughed, "We can't do that," he said. "We've already said we would come."
"Then let's cancel." She sat up, twisting so that she was facing him, her face alight with excitement. "Let's cancel, and do something special. Just the two of us."
"We don't have a valid excuse to cancel, Jen," he said, stroking her hair back from her face. His claws gently scraped her skin, and she closed her eyes and shivered.
"I love it when you do that," she whispered.
"We can dodge out early," he said quietly. "Or get there late, but we can't not go."
Opening those sky blue orbs, she leaned in, kissed him on the mouth. "You're going to have to let go of that motley group you call your family some day," she said with a sensuous smile. "You can't stay a momma's-boy forever."
"I'm not a momma's-boy," he argued, pouting slightly.
She caught his lip in her teeth. "Then show me."
He shook his head before the memory could go any further. He looked about him, his entire family was here, now bigger than it was back then. The two who made it increase in size, though, weren't present. But the rest of his family was, the whole lot of them. They were a motley crew. But they were his. Unlike Jennifer, they were always there for him.
Just as they were there for Alli and Denim.
And for this cyborg, who seemed so familiar, that blinked.
He wrinkled his brow.
"Donnie!" He was sure he saw it this time. "She's blinking."
As if in one accord, everyone around her looked at her eyes.
TSOTCTSOTC
Splinter was observant, when he wasn't angry. And he wasn't angry now. After years of contemplating the world around him, of keep hidden four rambunctious boys, of trying to integrate two family units, and then readjust to human society as a mutant himself, he was observant. And he observed Arcos' reaction to the cyborg from the very beginning of this debacle.
The bear was worried, something he rarely was. Of course, he didn't need to be, he was bigger than most people around him, could storm his way through almost any situation. If was ever in need of money, now that they lived like everyone else, he had only to ask the member of his family who happened to be 'most wealthy' at the time. Sometimes it was Donnie and April, sometimes Medusa, and occasionally Aries. If neither of them had money to spare, Medusa always took on an extra job or two, capturing a bad guy that was worth several thousand dollars, and gave the money to whomever needed it. He suspected that she'd paid Donnie and April back several of their expenses when they'd been forced to fork over the moolah for the family. Which was usually.
But while Arcos tended to brood, something that Splinter found highly disturbing, and always had, he did not tend so much to worry. And rarely did it show on his face. But it did now, looking down at the cocoa skinned woman with short black hair, who was, indeed, blinking.
"I think I've almost got her back online," Donnie said painfully, as if he were trying to squeeze his way through a small tunnel.
While Splinter was observant, so was his wife. Only she appeared to be observing something completely different than her ursine son. "Why are there crumbs on the floor?"
TSOTCTSOTC
Zoe stopped short in the hall, Raph huffing and puffing after her. She wrapped her arms around herself and leaned against the wall. She was getting a damn headache.
Mikey hadn't said a word when she apologized, not that she expected him to. Well she'd kind of hoped he'd yell at her. The fact was as she'd walked up to him she realized he was doing something highly unusual. He wasn't saying much at all.
She found that unsettling, maybe even preferred that he come loose. But beyond him snapping at Donnie to hurry up and fix the cyborg, and suggesting that his brother try to track her by her watch or cell phone, it was Raph and Leo that had been doing all the talking. She hadn't bothered listening to what they were saying. But if Raph didn't shut it, he was going to end up punched. Maybe even by her. She rubbed her face. He probably felt guilty, she sure as hell did.
"I know that look," Raph repeated coming to stand in front of her. "It's your 'I'm about to do something crazy' look, and now ain't the time for your solo act. So talk." He crossed his arms, scowling at her as if her leaving the room had inconvenienced him.
Well she didn't ask him to come with. In fact she wished he hadn't. He should be with Mikey. She needed to process this whole mess… and come to terms with what she might have to do about it.
Damn. Why didn't I go to the bathroom with them? But if I had, would the EDF have Anton right now? She chewed on her lip. She shouldn't value one life over the other, but in truth she was relieved they failed to take him. Who knows what they'd do to a born mutant-hybrid? Her stomach clenched into a knot. What were they doing with Denim and Alli? Surely a human child had no value, but depending on what was happening in EDF labs, a woman pregnant by a mutant could easily become a lab rat. Bile rose in her throat and she swallowed hard, not wanting to consider the horrors.
She imagined a wall in her mind to stop herself from reliving her lab experiences, instead shifted her thoughts to their one potential source of information. The cyborg. Her energy was surprisingly human, everything that makes up a soul, only wrapped in a metal container… She was filled with hope and warmth, there was no malice, not toward any of them anyway. In fact mid-reading the cyborg's energy reached for Arcos and his for her; as if she wanted him to hide her, and he wanted to keep her safe. This could mean a couple different things that she wasn't prepared to form an opinion about. Instead, with her brother's energy merging with the cyborg's and distorting her reading, she'd stopped, opting to simply take note of the connection.
"… And I need you to keep your cool in this. You and Anton don't go anywhere without me. Zoe, are you even listening?"
Raph snapped his fingers in front of her eyes. She hadn't heard anything prior to his lockdown announcement, but it was pretty much a speech she'd heard dozens of times before. Besides, she anticipated lockdown after this, but had no intention of obeying it. In fact, there was something she could do if the cyborg didn't pan out.
A chill down her neck and across her shoulders causing them to shiver.
It would be a last resort. But if it protected Anton and saved Denim and Alli, she'd have to do it. She just hoped it didn't come to that.
"Donnie!" Arcos yelled. "She's blinking."
Hoping they were about to get some answers, Zoe darted by Raph.
TSOTCTSOTC
Leo's voice pierced Karai's thoughts. "We need to talk."
Damn the timing on Leo's need to talk. She could be eating, sleeping, taking a bath, or they could be in the middle of a kidnapping getting ready to interrogate an enemy, potential turncoat, and Leo's wants to talk. Well not tonight. Besides he was starting to ask too many questions as it was.
Karai popped a hand on her hip and cocked an eyebrow. "About what? Shouldn't you be preparing to interrogate the witness?" She definitely had some questions for her. Hopefully her family members would ask some of them so she didn't draw any attention to herself, or slip up. Not that she ever would. But she had to be careful, the EDF and AFH had been two separate thorns in their sides. If they were connected in any way, then whoever was harassing her was someone powerful.
"Donnie!" Arcos' deep voice raised an octave, bringing everyone's heads whipping toward him. "She's blinking."
As all eyes shifted to the cyborg Karai's feet moved of their own accord bringing her front row and center for whatever happened next. Leo appeared on her left, Zoe and Raph on her right.
TSOTCTSOTC
A humming sensation passed through her as Sappho felt her systems go through another, final reboot before system analytics informed her that everything was finally reconnected. Although she still had no voluntary motion, thanks to whatever had been done to impede her sensory receptors, her body began running through automatic testing and diagnostics, most of which went unnoticed until it got to her eyes. If she were hearing correctly, the blinking seemed to have caught the room's attention.
"Donnie! She's blinking." Arcos's voice rumbled over her as everyone crowded in close.
"I know. Hang on, I'm just finishing up." The turtle working on her answered from somewhere beyond her line of sight.
"Can she speak yet?" She recognized that voice as belonging to Leonardo Hamato.
"Just a second. For our safety, I'm only going to unlike her ability to move from the neck up." As he spoke, Donatello did something and she could feel her senses returning. Her eyes could move again and her jaw unclenched. She looked around the room to see all eyes on her.
Leonardo started to speak, but Michelangelo beat him to it. The younger turtle leapt up onto the table, grabbing her by the throat, lifting her up and forward despite her weight. His eyes were narrowed and covered by the nictitating membrane that she'd only seen slide into place during combat. Each word was short and clipped, unusual for the normally verbose little turtle. "Where. Are. They?"
"I'm sorry. I don't know." She knew that this wasn't what he, or any of them wanted to hear. They'd probably been counting on information from her.
A short knife seemed to materialize in his hand. "Liar. Tell me!"
He started to slash down at her torso when Arcos caught his hand, just as the blade scraped across her ribs. "Maybe Leo should handle the interrogation."
Michelangelo glared at Arcos for a second before pulling his hand free, dropping her and jumping off the table. His knife clattered to the ground as he threw it aside while stomping out of the room.
Bolstered by Arcos's defense of her, she opted to volunteer what little she knew. "All I can tell you is where we were based, but I'm sure their handlers would have arranged a new location for them as soon as they were aware of my betrayal. I'm sorry."
TSOTCTSOTC
Yuuta watched the adults fussing about the cyborg woman, and then his brother Mikey storming out of the room. Aries' eyes were glued to the theatrics going on before him. He shook his little ratty head, and pulled Anton on the arm. The little turtle looked at him questioningly. Yuuta slipped his hand into his nephew's, and pulled him toward the window. With his snout, he motioned the kitchen window.
Anton hesitated a moment, glancing behind him at the grown-ups, before nodding and following his little uncle out into the night.
Yuuta squeaked, pointing in the direction they'd come and raised his hands in a questioning gesture.
Anton nodded, "Yeah, I can get us back to school."
Then, the two of them were gliding from shadow to shadow on the ground, like shades of something once living, passing people who never had an inkling that they were even there. They may have been little ninjas, but they were ninjas nonetheless. And Yuuta knew there was a reason he was a ninja, and it was his job to protect his family, especially those members who could not do so themselves. And while he had experienced the magic of being a mother firsthand, he had also experienced the lack of fighting skill mothers had. He had not yet figured out if mothers had fighting skills before they become mothers, and they disappeared afterward or not. Zoe still seemed to be able to fight like the rest of the ninjas, but he suspected that she was an even better fighter before she had Antonello. His own mother, he was told, was a worthy adversary, but no one in the family ever sparred with her, which he suspected was because she would lose hands down. "You must protect your mother while the two of you are out," his father told him on more than one occasion, smiling as he said it. "You know she gets herself into trouble." So, he did try to protect her. He hadn't had to actually do it yet, but he was prepared for the day when it came.
He had made a mental note to keep very close tabs on April and Karai's fighting, so that when they had children, he could see how much their fighting prowess diminished. Perhaps having the magic of being a mother made you fight less. He saw the dots, but had not yet figured out how to connect them all.
However, Demin could not take care of herself. That was obvious. He'd known it from the start, really, because she was a mother and had that mother magic. But now it was confirmed as he and Anton approached the ruin that was the side of the school building.
"They were inside," Anton said, "in the bathroom."
Yuuta pulled at the door, and the two of them entered the building. Anton lead them to the bathroom, where Yuuta stood in the middle with his little hands on his hips, his muzzle pointed up, smelling. He opened each of the bathroom stalls, then came back to the center of the bathroom.
The problem with adults, he'd discovered, was that they did not look very hard. They made the assumption that they knew where an object was, and therefore, they weren't able to find it. His father was always telling them, all of them, during classes not to make assumptions about the world around them, yet every adult he knew did exactly that. It was why they were not good at finding things. And why he was.
He could see the dent in the floorboard where there had obviously been a scuttle. Walking over to it, he pointed, Anton joining him. The two of them looked simultaneously to the window just above it. Yuuta leapt up onto the sill, the window was pried open, and on the side of the sill were three strands of red hair. He looked down at his nephew and smiled. Anton joined him as the two of them crawled through the window and out into the night.
