Sometimes, being a Ninja Turtle was a real drag. For example, when you left your fingerprints on an animal shelter window like a Ninja Noob, and then any fool could narrow down the list of suspects real quick, because who else has hands like that? Also, when headcases like Baxter Stockman took an interest in you.

"Who is Baxter Stockman?" Don asked, after they had all been handcuffed again and loaded back into the police van for "transport" to their new "situation".

"Baxter Stockman was April's boss," Leo explained. "He was running a science lab, producing these experimental robots."

"But we shut him down," Raph said. "Blew up the whole place."

"He was pretty mad," Mike concluded. "Vowed revenge and everything. All that evil scientist stuff."

"He saw you?" Don asked.

"Well, yeah," Raph said. "We were trashing his whole assembly line. He kinda noticed." He thought a moment. "He doesn't know about you, though."

"Well, he does now," Leo pointed out. "With the news and everything."

"Okay," Don said, "but explain to me again why you wrecked his state-of-the-art facility for the crime of engaging in cutting-edge robotics work."

"Uh, because his cutting-edge robotics destroyed our home," Mike said. "And then he tried to kill April."

"He doesn't know about that, though," Leo put in. "He didn't mean for the Mousers to bring down an old subway platform that, as far as anyone knew, was unused and uninhabited. He only designed them to rob bank vaults."

"Wait," Don said. He looked at the ceiling of the rocking van. "Mousers. Robbing bank vaults. I think I saw that on the news. Last summer, maybe."

"Well, yup," Mike said, trying to look as chill as possible with his hands cuffed to his waist. It was a challenge, but he pulled it off. "That was us. Bringing down bad guys, saving the city. All in a day's work."

"I really should learn more about your adventures," Don said. Mike was all ready to start giving him some of the highlights, but Leo interrupted.

"We shouldn't take credit for that," he said. "It was April who extracted key evidence from Stockman's computers, and turned it over to the police."

"Hey, that's right," Raph said. "How is this guy guardianing anybody? How come he's not in jail?"

"I think we're about to find out," Don said darkly. Then he added: "And also, you should take credit. Stopping a string of high-profile bank robberies is a great thing to have on your résumé."

"Do you ever stop thinking about how we can win this whole being-human case?" Raph asked.

"No," Don replied, and then they all fell silent for a while.

The building they pulled up to some time later was totally different from the one they had just left. Mike noticed that kind of thing. This place was all shining glass and steel, not gray concrete. Seriously, that precinct house had looked like nobody had even given it a good wash in years, let alone contemplated a new coat of paint in a cheerier color.

"Where are we?" Mike asked the guard who helped them down from the van. It wasn't one of the guards from the police station. Instead, he was wearing a uniform with a logo that matched the one on the building.

"This is Westchester," the guard replied.

"Oh yeah?" Mike was intrigued. "Where? Yonkers? Dobbs Ferry?"

"Ardsley," said the guard, who weirdly seemed to think that supervising a bunch of mutant Turtles was totally routine. Maybe that was a signal of something that would be important later. But Mike was not real good at focusing on things that would be important later.

"Ardsley?" he repeated. "Hick town. Wouldn't be seen here, myself."

"Whatever you say," said the guard, and it was so obvious that he was not even listening.

They were escorted to a room in the lower part of the building, and it was a total letdown. Not a stainless steel fixture to be seen. No bespoke furniture. Actually, just plain no furniture. There was a huge beautiful pane of clear glass, but it faced an interior room that was itself windowless. Aside from that, the walls were bare. And the floor was covered in hay.

"Um, sorry," Mike said, as the guard tried to usher him through the suspiciously thick door of the room. "We requested the penthouse."

"The whitecoats are going to have a field day with you," was all the guard said, before shoving Mike through the narrow doorway. His brothers were flung in after him, and then the door ground shut and the lock clicked in a way that suggested that even Raph would get absolutely nowhere with trying to pick it.

"Uh, hey!" Mike shouted through the glass. "Isn't a guardian somebody who takes you to live in a mansion and gives you all the toys and candy you ever wanted? I think we're in the wrong place!"

The guard ignored him and pressed a button on the opposite wall. "Dr. Stockman?" His voice was muffled through the thick window. "They're here."

Mike couldn't hear the reply at all. But knowing what a ridiculous windbag Stockman was, he felt he didn't really need to.

Without discussion, the Turtles lined themselves up in front of the window. Legs shoulder-width apart, hands by their hips, they managed to look as if they were at parade rest, standing in a calmly powerful pose by choice, rather than handcuffed and locked in what was basically a zoo enclosure.

Baxter Stockman swept into the observation room a minute later, and, totally predictably, the first word out of his mouth was a triumphant "Ha!" And after that, he couldn't resist monologuing a little. About how undefeatable he was. In the third person.

"Never underestimate Baxter Stockman!" he began. He talked loudly. Maybe so the Turtles could hear him clearly through the glass. Maybe so everyone in the building could hear him. "You destroyed my lab. You stole my secret data. You thought you could get me locked up, out of business, for years! But no! I have too many connections in this town. Too much power." He leaned close to the window, deliberately right in front of Mike's face. "You should never pick a fight with someone so much better than you, Turtles."

"I didn't do any of that," said Don, from Mike's left. "But thanks for answering my questions before I even asked."

Stockman whirled on Don, obviously furious that the fourth Turtle - the one he hadn't met yet - had one-upped him so fast.

"Donatello," he said - slow, smooth, sweet. It made Mike's skin crawl. "The lost one. An intellect to rival my own, they say." He took his time looking down Don's body, visibly scrawny even under his clothes. "But with a certain fatal weakness."

"If you're implying that you're entertaining the idea of withholding my insulin," Don said coolly, "you might want to check whether your connections will be interested in helping you out with a charge of negligent manslaughter. Of a minor. Who is your legal ward. Which, by the way, I want to see those guardianship papers."

"What are we doing here, Stockman?" Leo demanded, before Stockman could respond to what Don had just said. "I'm guessing that when you told the detective you would give us a safe place to stay while our legal situation is getting straightened out, that wasn't really what you meant."

"Are you calling Baxter Stockman a liar?" Stockman asked, crossing quickly to stand in front of Leo, and Mike could only roll his eyes. "Has anyone harmed you yet?"

"We're handcuffed," Raph said, jerking against his bonds to demonstrate his point.

"A mere precaution," Stockman snapped. "I saw what you did to my Mousers. I couldn't let you do that to my staff." He pivoted slowly to stroll again along the line of mutants. "I can only imagine what you have thought all these years: that anyone who discovered you would dissect you, to see what makes you tick." He turned and smiled into Donnie's face. "But we are scientists here, after all - not barbarians." He straightened up and strolled back the other way. "And at any rate, the soft sciences – biology, physiology, anatomy - are of little interest to me. My work is in artificial intelligence and machine learning. I am much more curious about your minds." Reaching the opposite end of the room, he turned to face Leo again. "For which work, of course, I need you alive, conscious, and cooperative."

"Alive and conscious I'll do," Raph said. "But cooperative? With you? Piss off, Stockman."

"Fascinating," was all Stockman had to say to that.

"Pretty sure I speak for all of us," Mike said, "when I say that if you want us to even consider cooperating, you gotta give us a nicer pad than this." He rolled a shoulder to encompass the room behind him.

"Yes, well." Stockman shrugged, in a careless way. "Given that the media has been mostly unable to observe your previous living environments, little is known about what constitutes appropriate accommodations for your kind."

Mike could put two and two together on that one. If they wanted to not sleep in straw, they were going to have to tell Stockman what he wanted to know.

Leo had quickly arrived at the same conclusion. "We won't tell you anything, Stockman," he said.

"You don't have to," Stockman replied, unexpectedly. "Do you think I have time to study you myself, Turtles? Oh, no. My time is far too valuable to spend on intern-level research tasks. You will tell my employees what I want to know." He shook his fist at what Mike could only guess was a ghost of April. "Employees who won't betray me."

"It's not good to hold a grudge, dude," Mike said.

"April O'Neil destroyed my life's work!" said Stockman, who clearly was not ready to let go. "With your help." He rocked back on his heels, smiling creepily. "But it was a happy setback. Now I have a new life's work." He smiled more broadly, which only intensified the creepiness. "You."

Mike's next line would have been "I think you need a new new life," but apparently Dr. Busy and Important Stockman had run out of time for talking to mutants, and with a quick word to the guard, he swept out of the room again.

"What are you looking at?" Mike said instead, to the guard, who was settling into a padded wheelie chair behind some kind of console.

"A magazine," said the guard, and sure enough, he produced exactly that item from a drawer under the desk.

"… You're not going to look at us?" Mike asked in bewilderment.

The guard shook his head. "This isn't my life's work," he said. "It's a job. I'm getting paid minimum wage. I'm not into betraying people - " He jerked a thumb at the door Stockman had just exited through. "But I have no loyalty to that guy." He flipped open the magazine, and the chair creaked as he leaned back. "Do whatever you want. As long as you're not escaping, it's not my problem."

They all wound up sitting in the straw, since standing defiantly was not impressing the guard at all.

Immediately, Leo got down to business. "Littlest, translate for Lost," he murmured, and then launched into an unnecessarily longwinded explanation of how they were all going to speak Japanese so Stockman and his scientists wouldn't be able to understand them. Mike could have explained that to Don himself, and in fact he did take some liberties as he hastily whispered in Don's ear in English.

"They're just going to get a translator, you know," Don hissed back.

"Yeah, but they won't be able to figure it out," Mike said, without bothering to pass Don's comment to Leo. "We barely understand Regular Japanese, so probably they won't know what we're saying either."

"I don't understand what you're saying," Don replied. "Haven't you been teaching me 'Regular Japanese'?"

"Duh, no," Mike whispered. "We're teaching you Hamato Japanese. Our Japanese."

"Why are you teaching me your family's own made-up dialect?" Don whispered furiously.

"Uh, so you can talk to us?" Really, that was a hurtful question. "I mean, do you know any Regular Japanese speakers you want to talk to?"

"Guys, knock it off," Leo hissed. "We need a plan."

"I vote for escaping," Raph said. "And blowing up Stockman's lab again on the way out."

"Why would we do that?" Don asked, after Mike had translated for him. "Stockman told us he plans to evaluate our intelligence. Passing those tests is a crucial step on our path to legal personhood."

"Okay, but couldn't we pass them with someone else?" Raph asked, after Mike had repeated Don's whispered comment.

Don shook his head. "I know who this guy is. I'm not good with names or faces, but I could never forget such a pompously asinine way of speaking. I've seen Stockman on the news. Insane plans for robotic robbery aside, he really is an accomplished and highly-respected scientist. If he says we're intelligent, there will be no questioning it."

Mike couldn't find a way of translating robotic robbery that captured the poetry of Donnie's phrase, but he got the point across.

"But why would he say we're intelligent?" Leo asked. "He hates us."

"Because if he concludes that we're not intelligent," Don said, "then he really has wasted his time. Learning about the mental processes of stupid mutants wouldn't contribute anything to his pursuit of superior machine learning algorithms."

Mike stumbled through his best Japanese approximation of superior machine learning algorithms, then hissed, "Bro, why are you making this hard for me?"

Don ignored that question in favor of asking, "How did Raph get uncuffed? Did he break the ties? Leo told him not to do that."

In response, Mike just nudged Don's knee with one bare foot.

Don took his time processing this second surprising feature of his environment. "How did your shoes get over there?" he asked, nodding to the neat pair of side-by-side snow boots. "And what does that have to do with my other question?"

"Okay," Mike said, "so this one time when I was little, I fell in the fire and burned my hands, and then -"

"I HAVE BEEN WATCHING YOU THIS WHOLE TIME HOW DID LEO GET UNCUFFED," Don hissed.

"Well, duh," Mike whispered back. "You gotta watch Raph."

"They shouldn't have locked us up with a bunch of straw," Leo said in Don's ear, barely more than an exhalation. "You can use it to release the catch on zip ties."

"You guys are ridiculous," Don whispered, though he didn't exactly complain as the plastic bands fell away from his wrists. He rubbed the reddened skin for a moment, then realized his brothers were all looking at him. "I hope you don't think I'm going to uncuff Mikey," he said.

"Ouch, bro," Mike said, because he really was sure Donnie could have figured out how to find a sturdy stalk and poke it into a little hole. But anyway Leo took care of it, and then they quietly settled back into their circle, while the guard continued to read his magazine.

"But as I was saying," Don whispered, "Stockman will be happy to release the news of his 'discovery' that we're intelligent, the same way Fenwick was delighted to break the news that we exist. It can only help his career. And once it's all been peer-reviewed and it's officially in the scientific literature, Uncle Stephen can take that to the courts and demand that we be declared legal persons."

"At which point Stockman won't be able to be our 'guardian' anymore?" Leo asked.

"Uh, well, no." Don rubbed his head. "That wouldn't definitely happen until we were eighteen."

Raph narrowed his eyes. "What is 'peer review' and how long does it take?"

"Don't kill me I'm only the translator," Mike said, after listening to Don's explanations. "He says 'other scientists do the experiment again' and 'years'."

"I'm picking the lock," Raph announced. "I can take that lazy-ass guard."

"Donnie looked at the lock on the way in," Mike relayed in a louder voice, after Raph stood up and Mike explained to Don why he was doing that. "He says no way can you pick it with straw. Or punch it. Or… or anything else," he added, as Don continued to whisper in his ear about things Raph couldn't do.

Raph was about to try anyway when he was startled to find a young woman standing on the other side of the glass-and-metal door.

"Oh," she said, and her eyes darted to his hands. "How did you get uncuffed?"

"We're pretty damn smart," Raph growled, and Mike could see Leo already scrambling to figure out how he was going to control Raph's mouth.

"Oh," said the woman, and then she just stared at him in shock.

"What's the matter?" Raph asked. "Never seen a talking turtle?"

"No," she said. "Only read about them." For another moment she just stared at Raph in wonderment, and then she said, "Oh, I'm sorry. My name is Lynn Peggiora. Dr. Stockman is the principal investigator, but I'm the one who will mainly be working with you."

"Tell it to my ass," Raph suggested.

Lynn just seemed delighted by this. It was a few more seconds before she could take her eyes off him to look at the other Turtles. "Which of you is David?" she asked.

"That's me," Don said guardedly.

"It's a pleasure to meet you," Lynn said, hurrying to press a hand against the glass closest to him. "What do you go by? Is it David, or Donatello, or Greenie?"

"How do you know about that?" Don asked, even as Mike echoed, "Greenie?"

"I read your notebooks," Lynn said. Then she pressed her free hand to her forehead. "I'm sorry. I still haven't introduced myself properly. I interned for Ron Engel, at the Beardsley Zoo, until I got fired… for reading your notebooks."

"Serves you right," Don said, unsympathetically, while Mike scrambled to catch up with the plot. "How'd you get here?"

"I applied for a position in Dr. Stockman's lab after he said he was going to do research on mutant cognition," Lynn explained. "With his reputation, I believed him. And with my unique knowledge of mutant development, he was glad to have me." She hesitated a moment. "We suspect there's a whole network of researchers who know about you. But none of them are coming forward."

Don gave no sign of whether this conjecture was true or false. "What's the study design?" he asked.

"Nothing complicated," Lynn said. "We'll replicate some classic studies of animal intelligence. If you pass, we'll perform the Wechsler battery. Then -" She took her hand off the glass, finally, to press it against her mouth. "I'm sorry," she said again. "You probably don't understand what I'm saying."

"You're talking about the WAIS-III," Don said, and Mike was sure glad he didn't have to translate that. "You want to try all four sub-indices?"

Lynn's mouth slowly fell open.

"Plan extra time for Digit Span," Don advised her. "I always ceiling out."

"What…" Lynn began, but she didn't seem to know where she was going after that.

"Altogether, I usually score 150-something," Don said. "But you don't have to take my word for it. I'll be happy to prove it."

Lynn seemed to have lost all power of speech.

"Although," Don said, "if you want the results to be valid, you might want to pay attention to how well-fed and well-rested we are before the test."

"Huh?" Lynn said, and Mike wasn't sure whether she was recovering or having a stroke.

Don just shrugged and looked at Leo.

"We want an apartment," Leo said, and even though Lynn had already heard Raph and Don speak, she seemed astonished all over again that Leo could talk too. "Bedrooms. A fully-stocked kitchen. Privacy. Locks on the inside." He gave the young researcher a hard stare. "Do it and -" He glanced back to Don.

"We'll make sure you get a groundbreaking paper out of this," Don filled in smoothly. "A real shame you'll only be second author."

"I'll… see what I can do," Lynn said faintly, and with a last look at the Turtles, she left the room.

"What did we just agree to?" Leo hissed, as soon as the scientist was gone.

"We're fine," Don replied, though the exchange seemed to have worn him out. "We said we would do our best on her tests. Which is what we want to do anyway."

"What's a Wechsler battery?" Raph asked, giving up on breaking the door down - at least for now - and rejoining the group. "Is it a kind of torture?"

"No, it's an intelligence test," Don explained. "They'll ask you to remember numbers. Compare some pictures. Solve some puzzles with blocks. It's really kind of boring."

"How do you know so much about this?" Leo asked. Mike thought that was an unnecessary question. By now, he'd just accepted that Don knew everything because he was Don. But he translated anyway.

Don sighed, when he understood what Leo was asking. "There's still a lot I need to tell you guys about how I grew up," he said. "But maybe it can wait until I can tell it to you without Mikey's interpreting."