Sandro did eventually notice that he was reclined on a bed with a girl cuddled up against his side. Their legs were kicked up together, their arms were interlaced, and he was resting his head on top of hers; they had the door closed and were completely alone with one another. Objectively speaking, this was probably the sort of thing parents nightmared about. Well, it was a good thing Donatello was distracted, then.

He felt her fingertips start counting scutes down the side of his shell, and he grinned. "Tell me some stories about yourself," he requested, seeing as her brain had returned to its normal resting state of absurdly curious. "Since we finally have the time."

"Okay. What would you like to hear?" she asked as she gathered her hands back to herself and eyed them like they needed a stern talking-to.

"Anything you wouldn't normally feel comfortable sayin," he suggested. "C'mere, I'll braid your hair. It'll remind me not to knock your lights out the next time you bait me, you've still got bruises."

"Ooh! Yes sir!" she complied, scrambling over his leg to sit between his knees. He loosened her banana and let it drop about her throat, and shook out her hair to start dividing it into sections. "Hmmm. Well I'm incredibly honest! When it comes to me, the devil's in the details. Once upon a time, I told you I had a friend whose mother never lets her outside. Do you remember that?"

"Sounds familiar. Her name was 'Willow,' right?"

"Yup! Lemme retell that story with all the details in place: I was skipping around Gotham's sewers one day, flashlight in hand, when I heard a girl crying. I went to investigate, and found her living in the ruins of an old sunken ballroom which someone had filled with plants. So I called to her through a rusted metal gate which seemed to be the only potential point of entry, and she was very excited to meet me. She said the gate was for her protection, and that her mother would kill me if I was found there, so with that in mind we kept our voices really low and just whispered to one another. I learned that her name was Weeping Willow, and that she was about one year older than me and loved Harry Potter."

"I swear, Wild... the random encounters you have with super people could be generated by mad-lib. Just randomly select nouns and verbs, and pop that somehow managed to actually happen to you." Sandro shook his head in disbelief. "That poor girl, I thought I had it bad. So, plants? Is she the daughter of Poison Ivy?"

"I didn't actually ask, but that was the conclusion both me and Dad jumped to. Ivy hasn't been seen in over a decade, but maybe she was just taking maternity leave?"

"Hmph." He shook his head again. "What about the story behind how you got that batarang?"

"Gee, I don't remember that extremely well. It was when me and dad were living in New York, so I must have been about six? We'd just been on the run from city to city, so I know something happened when I was five. My dad used to be in the PTA!"

Sandro dragged her head back to do a proper double take at her. "The Parent Teacher Association?"

"Oh he loved it, and we had amazing school parties! I remember that!" Sandro raised a brow, but then reflected on how this sort of made sense. "But he only joined it once, just that one year, just that one school. You know, I wonder if that's where I got it from. I sort of do the same thing: I give up."

"What d'ya mean, 'give up?' You're hellishly stubborn."

"Well the first couple places I went to school, I always met new friends and liked all my teachers and joined clubs and was happy. But somewhere along the line, I stopped wanting any of it, I stopped starting over from nothing, I stopped trying. Everything was always changing, and new things were interesting, but there was no real point in investing myself. And by the time we settled somewhere long term, I was already done, it was over, I'd never have a home or friends, teachers or teams, and that was just how it was: my life was outside at midnight, in the wind, in jumping and climbing and breathing..."

"Ya mean ya'd grown resigned." Sandro frowned as he started down the tail of the braid. "Like you'd numbed those parts of yourself so it'd keep away the burn of losin people over and over again."

"I... never thought of it as 'losing' them at the time, but maybe you're right. You probably are right, cause the first time you ever hugged me I remember thinking I was old enough to have a say in keeping you."

"If ya felt that way, numb all the time, why was meetin' me any different to ya?"

"I don't really know," she twisted to look back at him wonderously, "but the instant I heard your voice, I became so excited to meet you, it must have boiled out from inside and melted all the ice for one last 'try.'"

"My voice?"

"Yeah, I could tell you were young, and I could tell you were strange," she said with a bright flash of smirk. "Something clicked in my head, and I was like: I wanna know who this is, and please god let them like me. I was so sure you were going to evaporate on me, I even kept giving you the chance to do so! I went repeatedly back to that counter for food, and you could have dodged me at any one of those times. But you stayed...! You have no idea how fast people normally dislike me!"

"You seriously showed up out of nowhere, killed three people in the blink of an eye, saved my life, yelled at me for being ungrateful, mentioned you'd just moved here, and offered to buy me pizza and ice cream within the first ninety seconds. I was flummoxed out of my mind. I probably would have followed you anywhere to see what the hell you would do next."

"Ha! After I convinced you not to escape into the sewers, you mean?"

"Excuse me, there was still a body was falling off a roof while I was levering that manhole cover off! And then suddenly pint-sized-pointy-doom was lecturing me! Like, seriously, that guy with the gun landed right next to you and kinda splattered, and you didn't even flinch. Do you have any idea how untouchable that looked at the time? Now I know why, your foresight told you it was going to happen a quarter minute before it did, and all you cared about was he wasn't going to fall on you, but I just remember being flabbergasted and sore—because I'd just slid off a roof—as I tried to be that mysterious dark ninja boy who wasn't allowed to just blurt out 'Holy shit, who are you and where did all those knives come from!?'"

Wildcard burst out laughing and she laughed hard, flopping back into him and hugging to him lovingly. He laughed, too, gathering her into a tight hug. They were such a pair. Yin and Yang, bright and dark, crazy and steady.

"Finish the story!" he insisted past snorts and giggles. "The batarang story!"

"Okay, okay! Um... Well from what I remember, Harley Quinn—who now works for Batman as Fruit Bat—tracked us down. She was ecstatic to see Dad alive; Dad was less than thrilled to see her. Everything was going swimmingly explosiontastic until I ran onto the fight scene with tears and boogers everywhere, to find him all dolled up in Joker facepaint and on the verge of killing her. Which was a saving grace! Because Batman had just entered the building and noticed dad forfeited the coup de grace and knocked Harley out instead. You have to imagine this huge, clench-jawed, manly, grunting, death-threat-filled stand-off between arch-nemeses who haven't seen each-other in half a dozen years. Suddenly: Toddler me asks Batman if I can have his autograph and informs him that I want to be a super hero, and that being a race-car-driving ballerina-princess hockey player will be my secret identity."

"Oh geeze. Even as a baby you were turning everything on its head?"

"Apparently! Anyway, I don't remember exactly why Batman backed off that night, but I figure it must have had something to do with how not-exactly-evil my dad was being, or how cute I was. The two of them stalemated and we fled the state and vanished again. The difference was: now Batman knows for sure Joker is alive, and is looking for us, so that—via crazy person logicis why we ended up settling in Gotham. Cause who in their right mind would hide there?"

Sandro finished the braid and tossed it over her shoulder. "No wonder you left the city in such a big hurry after the mob car thing."

"Oh-ho, that story gets even worse. See, Dad knows who Batman actually is!"

Sandro paused in restoring her bandanna and leaned around her to stare at her face. "Yer shittin me. You know Batman's secret identity?"

"The little girl I rescued from the mob car was his. Picture me using sleight of hand to keep this poor exhausted, red-faced kid entertained, while my dad steps out and gets on the world's most bizarre phone call. 'Hey, guess who accidentally has your daughter and won't be strapping dynamite to her!' We did the handover at a McDonalds. She and I pretended to be sharks in the play-place ball pit while we waited. I followed her out to hand her my Happy Meal toy," Wild lifted up her fingers, "and got this effing close to Batman with my dad watching us like a cougar!"

"Oh god."

"But that's not even the worst part!" Wild threw up her arms in a tizzy. "She likes all the same kids cartoons I do! Don't you realize what that means!? I have to sit on the knowledge that Batman's eight-year-old daughter is a fan of Mikey's comics and that her favorite turtle is Donatello, because I have no way of explaining how I know!"

Sandro laughed so hard, because as far as Orange and Yang were concerned, that really would be the worst part.

They talked about similar sorts of things then—the cities she'd lived, the people she'd met, and her father's eccentricities—until an old running gag between the two of them reared up again: "Phew," Wild commented as she sniffed at her practice Gi. "Does your mom happen to have a shower cap tucked away somewhere down here? I think I need a post-workout bubble bath but I don't want to ruin this nice braid."


"Kids?" Donatello called as he left the lab, only to find Sandro just down the hall, outside the bathroom door, leaning with his back against the wall. "Oh, what are you doing?"

"Wild needed a shower," the boy explained with a smirk, "just wanted to make sure no one accidentally walked in on her. She should be about done, I heard the water shut off." He straightened up. "You wanted to start talking strategy, right? I told Uncle Leo I'd tell my parents this weekend."

Donatello was amused (and relieved) to have found their teenage boy guarding the privacy of a girl's shower. "You didn't, ehm, peek did you?"

Sandro blinked at him twice, and his expression said Donatello had better be joking. "What?" he growled.

Donnie lifted his hands placatingly. "I figured you wouldn't. Just reminded me of a story."

"A story?"

"Mnhmm. Once upon a time," Donatello lifted a hand to mask his budding grin, "someone accidentally wandered under the drainage grates beneath the fitness center showers. And, ehm, that person was Leo. He was so mortified during practice later in the day that Raph and Mikey jumped on the opportunity to torment him. They got the story out of him in under an hour, whereupon he ran to Sensei and burst out crying hysterically as he begged for forgiveness."

Sandro stared up at him for a long and critical moment, but then slowly cracked the more and more he imagined poor, traumatized Leo. "H-how old were you?" he slowly wondered.

"Like eleven, maybe twelve," Donatello cackled, because what had been earth-shattering at the time was now a harmless funny story in hindsight. "Um, Leo was quickly forgiven. The rest of us ended up in Hashi for a week for sneaking over to see what all the fuss was about, but we were all equally traumatized. Like: Raphael punched the lights out of anyone who mentioned it for the better part of a year." Donnie grinned at the floor. "You, um, have to remember we were living in the stone age down here; I'd gotten an old satellite television to work, so we had incredibly grainy cartoons, but certainly nothing revealing. And we never wore clothes, so how could we know?"

Ahhh, the unfortunate misadventures of adolescent turtles in a sewer. "No, I'd never 'peek,'" Sandro grumbled, though must have begrudgingly gave him that this was an acceptable question, because he was grinning a little. "Fortunately this is the future, where people have the internet, Wikipedia, and incognito browser tabs—but I'd never, ever admit to using them to ask what naked humans look like, so don't ask."

Dontello decided that was fair enough, and patted the boy on the shoulder. "Right, so... strategy. I think Mikey ran ahead to get some cake, but afterwards we can get started discussing how to open the topic with your mother, and begin training your accomplice to keep all her lewd jokes to herself. Hopefully it won't be that hard."

They heard from within the bathroom: 'That's what she said!'

Donatello and Sandro took a moment to contemplate how she'd played that. Then Donnie mentioned to Sandro, "When your mom first moved in down here, Mikey was infamously on laundry duty. He went streaking across the house using a black dress and her bra like a cape and batman helmet, shouting 'Who sent you?' at everyone."

Wildcard blew up laughing on the other side of the bathroom door. Sandro raised a hand to congratulate Donatello on a well-played turnabout, and a resoundingly solid hi-three/five was had. "Let's go get that cake."


Minimeme made it into the kitchen dead-last, and hurried up to ascertain whether someone else had already eaten her cake. (Sandro had tried, but Mikey had held it up too high for him to reach, nyah nyah!) The outfit she'd changed into was new and unusual!

"Whoa, hey! Nice!" Mikey did a double-take as he handed her the cake. Was this one of her birthday presents? Either it was based off a full body catsuit, or else the seam between leggings and shirt was lost under interwoven layers of taut white fabric. There was a hood built straight out of the collar, but it also had a close-fitting turtleneck, and the torso section hugged her like a well-worn leather glove. From the unusual cut, to the way strips of the fabric wrapped about her ribs, stomach, and thighs, the whole getup subtly advertised that it was made for action. And, d'aww, she still had her protective shin and forearms guards on over top! Such a tiny turtle!

"You said you wanted to hear about my birthday presents!" she laughed, doing a splendid twirl to show it all off. "Well here most of them are!" There was a design emblazoned on her back, almost like the symbol you'd find on happi jacket, and Mikey touched her shoulder so he could pause her and see it. It looked like a map compass pointing north—a cross on some circles with an arrow pointing up?—but instead of a 'N' for North, there was a 'W' on it! "Dad finally decided my old catsuit was too small," she explained. "So he made me something special!"

"It's white." Sandro pointed at her with a fork. "Catsuits are supposed to be black so they're difficult to see in the dark."

"Ha! And isn't that a smidgen of reverse psychology!" she laughed as she danced from toe to toe and admired herself. "He gives me a spectacularly comfy mischief-making outfit, but I can't do anything in it that I'd be ashamed to see on the evening news! Do you suppose that makes it a super hero costume? Or just a bank heist deterrent?"

"Your father makes you Halloween costumes mid year and encourages delusions of super-heroics?" Donatello asked dryly. "Despite coming from an underground ninja clan, I'm not sure if I can approve of this parenting methodology..."

Mini laughed—like she agreed!—and then gave a good-natured wave of her hand that didn't make any sense to Mikey. "Eh, at least he's trying, right?" she said in the voice of someone who felt compelled to defend some distantly estranged parent. "Its not like he can just give me purses and Barbies like a normal kid!" Wait a minute, whoa, was she about to completely get away with not discussing the costume? "I think I'll wear it just to let him know I appreciate the attempt."

"Hnh. Just so long as you aren't going to do anything foolish..."

"Naww," she snickered. "I'll behave! To the best of my admittedly limited ability! Actually, no wait, you probably should keep an eye on me: I feel like I've just jinxed myself and now am cosmically obligated to do something foolish..."

Donnie snorted, but was smiling a little, even if Mikey's disbelieving expression probably said more than a thousand costumes. Eep, play it cool! Wow, wow, all that said with Donnie none the curiouser!

It was a functional costume, wasn't it? Mikey pretended to be totally engrossed in fabric as he shifted his weight nearer to her. His finger brushed the overlapping fabric at the back of her ribs. He found sturdy armor under all the material, and sheathes for knives. So sneaky and pointy! He deliberately did not whistle despite how impressed he was. So deceptively cute!

"This is really good cake," Wildcard winked just for him, and he grinned. "You guys make it?"

"Yes, but cake's always best a few days later," Donnie mentioned as he finished and stood. "I'm going to grab a few things out of the lab. I'll be right back; don't start Birthday Sharing without me, I have the best videos and you all know it." He pointed at them to let them know he was serious and then hurried back down the hall.


Mikey and Sandro waited till they heard the lab door shut, and then both rounded on Wildcard. "Holy Cha-lu-pa," Mikey whispered aghast, as Sandro wondered aloud, "Exactly how much ordinance have you smuggled into my house, Crazy Pants?"

"Ho! I have long knives, throwing stars, smoke bombs, slime grenades, gecko claws, knock-out gas, mustard gas, proximity mines, a deck of cards, switch blades, this thing here," she snickered, drawing out all sorts of shapes and putting them away just as invisibly. "I wanted to practice carrying all the weight! Flips are different when you're twenty pounds heavier! D'you think Leo will let me train in it?"

"You're supposed to be making it easier for my family to like you!" Sandro protested. "Not scaring the shit out of them!"

"Are you kidding?" Mikey gestured to her with both hands. "She fits right in! Perfectly!"

"Yeah but no one cares!" Sandro threw up his hands. "Everyone wants to be super suspicious and judgmental, pretending we're normal and have high standards, when in reality we exist because a bunch of under-aged kids ran around beating up evil ninja clans with live weaponry and making friends with whatever rift-raft found the front door!" He gave a dramatic sigh, pushed his empty plate out of the way, and flopped his head into both arms atop the table. "We're telling mom over the weekend," he added.

"Well when I first met Mini," Mikey mentioned, "she ran down the rear bars of a crane no-handed in the middle of a hurricane. So I started off on the assumption your new friend could keep up with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle! And from the looks of things, Leo figured the same thing. Donnie'll see it when Donnie's ready to see it, but, pfft, nobody has to drown April in details before Mini's had time to grow on her."

"We'll have to practice talking to her," Wildcard realized. "I need to be coached not to take control of the conversation and babble like a maniac over top of everyone else. Donnie can pretend to be her. Maybe Mikey can squeeze my arm whenever I'm talking too much."

"Yeah maybe you need to practice not talking," Sandro muttered. "Your whirlwind technique works best to break old walls, not as introductory material."

"I can sit still and be quiet." Mikey and Sandro looked doubtfully at her, but she reminded them: "I did use to go to public school, after all. But she'll ask me questions about myself, I'm sure. Ooh! By the way." She produced a brightly-wrapped birthday present from nowhere. "This is for you! I told Dad that if he wanted to make you something, it had to be a completely wholesome gift, so don't expect anything too exciting."

Sandro and Mikey both perked up, and then the former hesitantly took the box and tore the paper off. He wadded it and tossed it to Mikey, who swiftly disposed of the evidence and turned about just in time to witness the reveal of a tin of home-made pecan, caramel, and chocolate cookies. Sandro hastily covered it. "This was extremely exciting," he disagreed. Mikey reached out to demand cookies, and Sandro caved and passed him and Wild one.

"Hey, he did a really good job at the 'wholesome' part while also making it a joke. I think these are technically called turtle cookies," Wild was impressed. "So! My story is I'm Sandro's school, play, and Ninjitsu buddy?"

"Right, and ixnay on hallmarks of a teenage vigilante," Sandro told her as he gobbled up a second cookie (and had to give Mikey and Wild a second cookie to compensate). "Doesn't matter if you aren't actually doing anything; don't be showing off. No knives within a month of meeting mom. And definitely no bombs."

"Roger! I should take notes, hmm."

"No knives and no bombs," Donatello repeated as he entered the room with a portable tablet and a stack of books. He set the latter on the table and pushed them to Wildcard. "It's sad that we should have to start so low, but probably best that we are thorough in our prohibitions, as we've clearly taken in a maniac. Here, Ana, take a look at these."

"School books?" Mini realized as she took them. "Oh! 'Beginning Japanese'?"

"Yes. If you would like, I would be happy to formally instruct you, and we can arrange some class time for the two of you instead of pushing Sandro's coursework off til after your visits. It's up to you; take a few days to think about it."

Mini looked up at him. "Can you teach math?" she wondered, and Mikey immediately liked that idea. Helping to home school her? Solid! The more time she was around their family, the less everyone would waste time worrying who/what her dad was, or why he could/would gift her an armored ninja costume.

Donatello blinked. "I... what is the context of the question?"

"I'm almost done with Stewart's Calculus," Mini explained. "I don't know where to go after that, and my father never went to university so he can only help me so much. I could watch free MIT lecture podcasts online, if I just new what to start on next, but I'm kinda on my own."

Purple Turtle stared at her like he was rapidly closing ten thousand mental browser tabs to clear space. "Ha!" Mikey actually laughed. Bingo, Donnie! And you were so slow, Leo beat you to her! How slow? Too slow!

Though Donnie sort of already had a Little Ninja: Sandro. It was Leo and Mikey who had been left, for one reason or another, a little further back on the sidelines.

Hmm.

Well that didn't mean Donnie couldn't warm up to her, tehe. "Linear Algebra," Purple Turtle finally said. "After Calculus III, the next most common topic would be Linear Algebra. Is-" he looked to Sandro, who offered him a cookie since he was far too distracted to question said cookie's origins "-is she being serious?"

"She's got the book dog-eared to about three quarters of the way through," Sandro supplied hesitantly, because he only knew so much about the topic and couldn't attest to her skill level. "And she works in it a lot when she gets exhausted by remedial work. You know, like... a normal person would work on a book of Sudoku puzzles? I've seen her do it. I tease her about it."

"My copy the book is like twenty years old and I had to dig it out of the dump cause I left all my old books behind in Gotham, but assuming three-dimensional math hasn't changed much in that time period, I think I'm good?" Wildcard hazarded.

"Hmm. Well." Purple Turtle leaned back. "Speaking of things that might impress someone's parents," Donatello remarked off-hand and then waved to dismiss the issue. "We'll talk about this afterwards. For now... I present to you all: the best of our family home videos from the weekend." He proudly pushed the tablet he'd carried in over to them. "And I'll warn you now, we have some unexpected tiny arrivals in there... four of them. With teeth."

"Oh my."


Wildcard was still giggling to herself about Raphael's need to assert his masculinity by disapproving of the alligator girls' names while simultaneously giving them bright pastel kerchiefs to wrap about their necks.

"This isn't going to work," Sandro reflected of the role-playing exercise they had scheduled with Donnie. "She's not going to talk to you seriously as if you were my mom and they were actually meeting for the first time, she's too giddy."

"M-maybe that's for the best!" Wildcard cackled. "I can get it all out of my system." Sandro slumped into a face-palm.

Donatello wasn't certain whether to indulge her or not, but eventually leaned over and asked, "So introduce yourself, Miss...?"

"Hi I'm Wildcard!" she squealed. "And there's a non-negligible statistical possibility I might be your future daughter in law!"

Donatello blinked. Sandro slowly lifted his head and looked over at her. A moment passed in silence.


"YOU ARE SO DEAD!" boomed thunderously to shake the entire household. Wildcard sped away at break-neck speed and Sandro followed after her with a chair held high and a clear intent to murder.

So much Spirit of Raphael was being channeled in the moment that Donatello actually got up and hurried after them to make sure Wildcard would be alright. Unlike Mikey, who had a shell, strength, and a high regenerative factor, this girl was only human. For a moment it looked like Sandro had cornered her in the dojo, but then she hit the wall at a sprint, ran herself up a good solid six feet, and catapulted back through the air above him, kicked off the chair and his shell, and send herself rolling safely to the ground.

"Too slow, bro!" she called just like Mikey as Sandro stumbled into the wall, threw the chair after her, missed, roared, and chased after her again.

Donatello blinked quietly at where that wall-run stunt had just gone off without a hitch, noting how difficult it had been and that Sandro could not have pulled off anything similar. Hmm. He glanced behind himself at where there children were sliding into, bumping, and possibly breaking things across the house, and concluded Leo's decision to train her hadn't been as arbitrary or conciliatory as it had looked.

Food for thought. Donatello shrugged to himself and went to go make two different kinds of healing ointment, because he had a feeling someone would need it.


When Wildcard got home in the early morning hours, she was happy. Michelangelo had walked her most of the way home and touched the top of her head fondly, and she felt this sorta oozy good feeling people only got when being doted on by someone they trusted. Sandro hadn't managed to kill her, and Donatello's healing ointment had been unnecessary (although he had destroyed a perfectly good throw pillow)!

Eventually she'd calmed down and stopped shouting things from the peanut gallery while Sandro was practicing things he'd say to his mom with Donatello. She'd watched the two of them work through all sorts of questions April might ask, or avenues the conversation might turn down. Some times, Sandro visibly panicked over things that seemed kinda simple, and then they'd have to back track and figure out why, and watching him struggled had brought out Wildcard's better parts and sent her over to hold his hand and calm him down.

Wildcard slipped into her house and took off her hoodie and baggy pants, and then got out of her costume. She dressed into bedtime clothes, but then found her way down to her dad's room and peered within. He'd turned in early for the 'night.' She watched him for a moment, and then tottered over and climbed into the bed and snuggled with him.

"Did someone die?" Joker asked her sleepily.

"Just really happy," she yawned.

"I'm buying that family a military grade turtle-shaped submarine," Joker decided. "As an expression of my eternal gratitude."

"Dad."