"Lost your job, boss sent killer robots after you, what else could go wrong?" she laughed nervously.
Then her foot struck something in the dark, and her head struck something else as she fell, and she collapsed face-first into the putrid water.
She woke slowly from the weirdest dream. She'd been at work - a normal dream, but not her favorite one; why couldn't she ever dream of George Clooney? - debugging Mouser code, when suddenly the robots started doing things she was sure she hadn't programmed them to do. She had run away from the small group of test robots, only to discover that her boss had a secret warehouse of thousands of the things hidden under the lab.
Okay. Weird, but straightforwardly related to the stress of the job. Stockman had been demanding a lot from her lately. She took a breath and let the dream go.
But - then there had been that other part. The Mousers had chased her into a sewer, of all places, she had never been in a sewer in her life, and everything had been slimy and wet and gross. Where had that come from?
Somewhere, something was dripping steadily. She listened to the sound of water on water, and groaned.
She must have been hearing that all night. The bathroom was flooding, and instead of being woken by it, she'd just had a bad dream about sewers.
All right. Time to get up, call a plumber, let Stockman know she would be a little late to work. She deserved the time off anyway.
She tried to get up, and found she couldn't move very far.
Panic began to set in as she opened her eyes. A niggling sense was beginning to warn her that things were not as they seemed.
She was lying on concrete in a room she had never seen before. It was dimly lit by bare fluorescent bulbs dangling from the ceiling. The room was filled with garbage: rusty mechanical parts, empty food packages, some huge jugs of who-knew-what. There was broken furniture and children's toys and small appliances of every kind. On top of the pile lay a Mouser, its head completely caved in. There was hardly a bare patch of floor, except for a wide semicircle around her, which had been swept clean.
She was chained to the wall.
And somewhere, something was dripping.
She shivered and pulled herself up to a sitting position. Her clothes were officially ruined and the rest of her probably didn't look so great either. She was hungry and in pain and she probably should have been afraid, but some part of her dimly recognized that she had switched into survival mode, and fear would be delayed until it was safe to dissolve into a sobbing mess.
She looked around again. Doorways and corridors led off into other parts of the space, which she couldn't picture in her mind as being anywhere but underground. Maybe it was because the last place she had been was underground - she was beginning to accept that being chased into the sewers by killer Mousers had not been a dream - and her logical brain demanded some level of consistency in her spatial experience.
But she certainly hadn't been here before. What had happened while she was unconscious?
"Hello?" she called tentatively.
As soon as she said it, she drew back against the wall. Maybe that had been a bad idea. Her survival mode didn't get a lot of practice.
She could hear something moving around the corner. There was a heavy shadow against the wall, and then a figure emerged.
Immediately she could tell that something wasn't right, but any theory she ever would have formulated was proved wrong as soon as the - thing stepped into the light.
It was green and powerfully built and decidedly not human. Not any kind of creature she had ever heard of. Not something that should exist, her brain told her. Something that big could not possibly be running around New York without being known to science.
It didn't look friendly as it approached her.
"Oh my god," she squeaked, scrambling back against the wall. "Ohhh my god. You are not real. This is not real. I was dreaming. I am still dreaming. I'd like to wake up now."
The creature ignored her. It probably didn't understand what she was saying. It was sure-footed, somehow managing to find floor under all the detritus, and it was silent.
This was officially the weirdest, most terrifying dream she had ever had. Some part of her brain regretted to inform her that this was not a dream, but she told it to shut up, because to contemplate the alternative would be to descend into madness.
The creature reached the edge of the cleared semicircle, and crouched, watching her.
"What are you?" she asked, as though it would do any good.
The creature leaned slowly forward, stretching out its wrinkly neck. It balanced itself on three splayed fingers, one of them attached in a thumb-like arrangement, she noticed. Its nostrils twitched as it regarded her, but only languidly; it didn't seem to rely on a sense of smell. Its eyes were large, brown, intelligent.
"What. Are. Youuu?" it croaked, and she jerked back so hard she nearly knocked herself out again.
The creature drew back warily at her sudden motion, retreating to just beyond her reach. "Yeah," she said. Her voice was soft and shaky. "What are you."
The creature watched her, blinking its huge eyes just infrequently enough to be unsettling. Then it rose to its feet and moved away into the darkness.
For a moment she sat, stunned. Then her survival brain remembered it was supposed to be in charge here, and prompted her to look at the chains.
They weren't especially strong, and looked as though they might have been stolen from a playground swing set. Unfortunately, she wasn't especially strong either, and attempting to break the metal links got her nowhere.
The chains were looped through a pair of metal handcuffs whose provenance she tried not to think about. What was more important was that this arrangement was clearly the work of a sophisticated intelligence. No animal would do anything like this. There must be a human here.
"Hello!" she called again. "My name is April O'Neil! I'm - I'm a United States citizen!" She didn't know if that would do her any good, but having just lost her job as lab assistant to a prestigious scientist, it was all the credentials she had. "Hello!" she shouted, her voice ringing off the concrete walls.
The echoes had hardly died away when the creature appeared again, moving faster this time. "Oh no no no," she managed, before it was on top of her. It hauled her to her feet by her shirtfront - It has opposable thumbs, it's strong - and slapped her.
Her cheek stung, and she stared at the creature, mouth agape. It stared back, its eyes huge and gold.
It wasn't the same one.
She had barely gotten her head around the most basic meaning of this thought - she hadn't even scratched the surface of the implications - when another of the creatures showed up in a doorway. Whether it was the first, or a third, she couldn't tell at this distance. It made a series of chirping and squeaking noises; the one with the golden eyes grunted and dropped her to the ground. Before she could say anything, both faded away into the shadows.
She lay in a heap, panting, trying to remain still and silent. She didn't want to provoke the creatures again. Her survival brain announced that it was not at all prepared for this and was submitting its letter of resignation, but she refused to let it get off that easily.
The dripping of water was like a clock, but there was no way to tell time in the subterranean chamber. If she'd had her cell phone with her when she fled the lab, she didn't have it now. She lay on the floor for what felt like hours. A part of her that had read too many novels told her that the cold should be seeping into her bones, but in fact it was pleasantly warm in the room.
After a long time, she examined her bonds again. She studied the lock of the handcuffs, but didn't have anything to pick it with. She searched the length of the chain and could not find a weak link. She pulled the loops slowly through each other but there was no way to pull them apart. She looked at where the chains were attached to the wall, and found that the locking rings were sunk into the concrete with heavy screws.
Her gaze swung outward to the detritus that filled the room. Just beyond the edge of the cleared space was a flat piece of dark gray plastic - a segment of racetrack for the toy cars that were scattered around the room. If she could reach it, it might be good enough as a screwdriver.
She began to inch towards her target, trying to watch all the corners of the room at once. The creatures moved so silently, she couldn't be sure they weren't watching her even now.
She had more reach with her feet than with her hands. She turned around, stretching towards the track piece with the toe of her sneaker. If she accidentally kicked it away, she knew, her chance would be gone.
She aimed to hook her foot behind the empty bag of potato chips the track segment was lying half on top of, to pull it closer to her. Slowly, slowly, trying not to let the bag crinkle and alert her captors that she was up to something, she angled into position.
She could just barely reach. She lifted the foil bag from behind. Stretched as far as she could go, she had no leverage, and even the thin piece of plastic seemed impossibly heavy. She willed her ankle to lift it anyway. A millimeter at a time, the racetrack tipped up, and then slid towards her across the smooth floor.
She looked around - the coast was clear - and hurriedly scraped the track towards her with her heel. As soon as she could, she snatched it up with her hands, snapping off the plastic tabs that would hold it in place against an adjoining segment.
She spun around and jammed the track into the slots of the anchor screw. The plastic was flimsy; the anchor, not so much. The screw's threading had to give way before the cheap toy did.
She turned her makeshift screwdriver. The plastic twisted in her hand. She adjusted her grip, pinching either side of the very end of the racetrack, and tried again.
Whoever had installed the locking rings was strong, and had screwed them down all the way. It wasn't going to be easy to get them out.
April glanced over her shoulder, and put her weight into another turn of the screw. It was her only game plan.
She didn't know how long she worked at it; every time she felt ready to give up, she thought the screw turned just a tiny fraction, and she redoubled her efforts.
She tried not to think about the fact that there were four screws. She'd thought about it just long enough to test each one of them, and they were all as firmly embedded in the concrete as the first one she had tried.
Absorbed as she was in the effort, her survival brain still grudgingly did its job by alerting her that someone was coming. She spun away from the wall and dropped to the floor, sitting on the precious piece of plastic.
Two of the creatures came into the room, and then three - there are three - and then four. She held her breath, unable to suppress the image of thousands of Mousers on the underground assembly line. She had thought there were only half a dozen prototypes. She didn't plan to make the same mistake with these creatures.
"How many of you are there?" she breathed.
The creatures moved across the room like ghosts, as though they weren't even on the same plane of existence as the heap of junk. Her eyes darted to the chip bag, then she forced herself to look away. If the creatures noticed that anything had been disturbed, they gave no sign.
They came towards her, arranging themselves along the edges of the cleared space. She could have reached them, could have hooked their ankles with her own - but then what? They were stronger than her, they were obviously heavier, and they had already shown they could be aggressive.
They were making more of those soft squeaking noises as they looked at her. It sounded almost like birdsong, yet had the cadence of a conversation. She could have sworn they were taking turns.
And then one of them said, "You. Man."
The squeaking had stopped, and April had the uncomfortable feeling that she was being addressed. Addressed in a meaningful way, even. Animal intelligence was not her area of expertise, but that hadn't sounded like imitative speech. "You can talk."
"You man," the creature repeated, and it dawned on her that it might actually expect a response.
"No," she said. "No, I'm not."
She must have been anthropomorphizing, because the creature seemed to not only understand this answer, but to be unsatisfied by it. "Youuu-man," it tried again.
Human. It was saying human.
"Oh," she said. "Yes. That I am."
The creatures conferred again, in their strange language. She knew she shouldn't even let herself think of it as a language, but she couldn't help it. It was impossible to not perceive the creatures as intelligent. Maybe it was their human-like postures and gestures. Maybe it was the total lack of evidence that anyone other than them had brought her here and chained her up like this. Maybe it was rapid-onset Stockholm Syndrome. She tried to remind herself to be scientific about all of this, but so far rationality had proved to be a pretty poor approach to today's events.
And then the creatures were speaking English again. To each other.
"What do with it?" asked one. It crouched, and the others followed suit. As they came down to her level, she could see it was the brown-eyed one that had spoken. The golden-eyed one was to its left; to its right was one with blue eyes. The fourth, with calm grey eyes, crouched at the far left of the line, just in front of where she had stolen the track piece from. She tried not to show how the plastic slat was digging into her butt.
"Eat," the blue-eyed creature suggested. April could not classify the expressions that came onto its companions' faces as anything other than thoughtfully appraising, and she did not like it one bit.
She sprang into action, snatching the track piece from underneath herself and striking out with it. The broken, jagged edge swung at the blue-eyed creature's soft-looking neck. She didn't want to inflict that much damage, but she didn't know where else to aim: their chests were protected by a type of organic armor, like an armadillo's plates, and the skin on most of their bodies looked rubbery and tough.
Her aim didn't matter; the strike never landed. She found her wrist caught in the firm grip of the brown-eyed one. She hadn't even seen it move.
It plucked the makeshift weapon from her hand as though her strength were no more than that of a child, and showed it to the blue-eyed creature. The sharp chirps that accompanied this gesture sounded for all the world like a reprimand.
The blue-eyed one hung its head. The one with brown eyes turned the other way and chirped what sounded like a command. Her attempts to break its grip while its attention was elsewhere were met with effortless resistance.
The gray-eyed creature moved across the room, picked up the crushed Mouser, and brought it to the brown-eyed one, who tossed aside the track piece in order to accept the new object. The brown-eyed one studied the robot for a moment, then held it out to April. "Yours?"
"Yes," she said, and was met with angry hisses from all the creatures. "I mean, no. My boss invented the Mousers. He hired me to write code. I was programming them to find and retrieve objects. I had no idea about the override routine…" She trailed off. "You don't know what any of that means."
"Understand," the creature said, and even if April had believed it, she never would have predicted what happened next. Slowly, the creature released her wrist, set the Mouser on the floor, and shifted into a kneeling position. "Teach me?" it asked.
She felt like she'd been hit in the head from the inside, and she slumped to the floor, unconscious.
When she came to, the brown-eyed creature was still sitting near her, but the others had gone.
"Apriloneil," it said, as soon as it saw she was awake. It pronounced her name as one word.
"Uh. Yeah." The chains clinked as she reached up to rub her head. "Somehow that's still me." The creature didn't seem to understand her sense of humor, so she tried again. "What about you? Do you have a name?"
"Donatello," the creature replied, in its halting way. "Them - my brothers. Live here. Found you…" He - she couldn't go on calling it it - made a vague outward gesture. "Out there."
"And chained me to a wall?" she asked, raising a brow.
"Human," he said, as if that explained everything. He looked over his shoulder and made a loud series of squeaks.
"And you're obviously not," April said, when Donatello faced her again. "What are you?"
"Hard… hard story," he said. "Not now." He nudged the Mouser forward, its deeply-treaded feet scraping across the floor. "You teach."
"You want me to teach you how to program a robot," she said flatly, and received an emphatic nod in response.
Another of the creatures emerged from a doorway, dropped down in front of her, and offered her a steaming pile of meat wrapped in a greasy newspaper.
"Michelangelo," said Donatello, and April mentally attached that name to the one with blue eyes.
"And what's that?" she asked, pointing to the meat.
"Small… small animal," Donatello tried, and he made a little hopping movement with his fist.
"A rabbit?"
"Rabbit," Michelangelo agreed. He imitated the hopping movement, then pounced on his fist with his other hand, demonstrating how the poor creature wound up as April's next meal.
Donatello smacked Michelangelo in the head. "Cooks good," he said, and April could have sworn there was a tone of apology in his voice. "Otherwise, fucking stupid."
The swear, along with the casualness with which it was uttered, took her aback. She accepted the food and ate a little. It wasn't bad.
"The others?" she asked.
"Raphael," Donatello replied. "Sorry for hit. And Leonardo. Back later."
"Who named you?"
Both of the creatures looked at the floor. "Father," Donatello said, and no amount of rationality could deny the sadness hanging from the word. "Dead. Long time."
"There are no people here, are there," she said.
Donatello shook his head. "No human. Never human."
She was about to ask something else, but her brain was stuck on the way he had said never. "Your father…"
"Not human," he repeated emphatically. He looked up, his gaze hard. "Our story. Not for you." He laid a hand on the Mouser. "You teach now."
"Yeah, about that," she said, trying to look calm even though Donatello had just as good as admitted to kidnapping her and chaining her to a wall. "Also kind of private information. Even though I'm pretty sure I don't work for Dr. Stockman anymore, I could still get in a lot of trouble for sharing trade secrets."
The two creatures stared at her blankly.
"Not allowed to teach you," she said slowly. "Okay?"
Not okay, apparently. Donatello's gaze darkened a shade further. "Teach me," he demanded again. "Or -" He pointed to her, then drew a line down his chest with one finger.
For a moment she didn't know how to interpret the gesture. Then: "Are you threatening to dissect me?"
He shrugged. "Want to learn from you. Don't care what."
She sat back, kicking herself for ever having thought of Donatello as nearly human. He wasn't, and she should never have begun to trust him as though he was. "How do I know you won't dissect me after I teach you about the Mousers?"
He seemed to like that idea a little too much.
"Okay," she said, handing the barely-touched packet of food to Michelangelo. "I'm out of here. Unchain me now."
Donatello shook his head.
"What am I going to do?" April demanded. "I'm half your size."
"Tried to stab me," Michelangelo pointed out.
That was true. April was a little proud of her racetrack shiv, even though it hadn't worked at all.
"Well, I'm out of weapons," she said. "I just want to go home."
The two creatures didn't seem inclined to consider that request, so it was just as well that at that moment, one of the others arrived. Virtually ignoring her presence, he crossed to the two seated before her and delivered some sort of long report. Only when he was finished did he turn his grey eyes to study her.
"Leonardo," Donatello said to her, in case she had forgotten this one's name. "Went to find…" He trailed off, and the three conferred again in a rapid sequence of chirps and squeaks.
"Went to Mouser place," Michelangelo said, when they had reached some sort of consensus. "Found many. Hundreds-hundreds. What for?"
"I don't know," April replied. "I thought there were only six. I just found out today that Stockman has a factory where he's making thousands of them. I don't know what he's planning, but it can't be anything good."
Michelangelo turned to say something to his brothers, and her eyes widened. "You're not stupid," she said to him, when he was finished. "You speak English better than they do."
He grinned at her. His next sentence obviously cost him a great deal of effort, but it was nothing short of astonishing.
"They - don't … appreciate … my - genius."
It was at about this point that her own language skills virtually abandoned her. "My god." They all stared at her curiously. "I - I don't know what you are or where you've been hiding, and your social skills are seriously lacking, but you are smart." She looked each of them in their large, intelligent eyes. "Please. I just want to go home and be safe and pretend none of this ever happened."
"We want safe too," Michelangelo said. He passed the rabbit meat to Donatello, so he could reach for the Mouser and offer it to her. "Mouser wrecked our home. Afraid of more. Help us stop them."
She took the battered robot slowly. "You mean the place didn't look like this before?"
Michelangelo looked embarrassed at the question. "Show it?" he asked his brothers. Donatello looked up at Leonardo, and after a moment Leonardo nodded.
"Don't run," Donatello said, as he leaned forward. "Don't want to hurt."
"Yeah, okay," she said, deciding not to mention how just a few minutes ago he'd seemed very interested in the idea of dissecting her.
She couldn't see what he did to the handcuffs, but in a moment they popped open. He stood and, to her great surprise, offered her a hand up. She declined to take it.
None of them touched her once she was on her feet, but they kept her closely surrounded, guiding her down a corridor and into another room. The fourth creature - the one who had struck her, Raphael - was kneeling on the floor in a pile of rubble. There was a gaping hole in the wall, but not all of the debris was from that. Among the wreckage she could see splinters of wood, shards of glass, and even torn ribbons of paper. Scattered across it all were broken and disabled Mousers, some of them even more thoroughly crushed than the one in the other room, some lying in pieces.
Raphael looked over his shoulder, growling when he saw her. He got to his feet, and she noticed, as she hadn't before, that his leg was heavily bandaged. "You - did this," he gritted out.
She was pretty sure he was about to leap on her and dismember her - interfering with Donatello's hoped-for dissection, probably - but Leonardo stepped into his path and talked him down with a smooth series of chirps.
"Mouser ate wall," Michelangelo murmured, by way of explanation. "Ate Father's shrine. Ate Raph's leg."
"I - I'm sorry," was all she could think to say. "I didn't know they could do that."
The words were useless, and probably no one could hear them over Raphael's howling. Distantly, she noticed that none of the other creatures seemed bothered by the manic behavior. She found herself shrinking back against Michelangelo. She had no reason to believe that he wouldn't hurt her – he had, after all, suggested eating her – but he was still the sanest being in the room, and in her desperation for reassurance she instinctively moved towards him.
"I'll help, I'll help," she heard herself saying. "Just please don't let him kill me."
"Won't kill you," Michelangelo told her, before adding: "Leo might."
"Leo…?"
He smiled, and it seemed wholly inappropriate for the situation. "It's always the silent ones."
He led her out of the room. As Leonardo calmed Raphael, Michelangelo made Donatello disappear with a quiet word, and proceeded to ply April with food and tantalizing pieces of his story.
They called themselves Turtles, and as soon as he said the word, the resemblance was obvious to her. There were only four of them, and they had always lived beneath the streets of New York. The father whose shrine they had tended with so much dedication had raised them and cared for them until his untimely death; he was neither human nor Turtle, though Michelangelo wouldn't say what he was.
They had learned English from eavesdropping on the streets and from TV. They had TV because Donatello was a technological genius. They took care of themselves through scavenging and trapping, they feared humans, and they only wanted to be left alone.
They didn't intend to let her leave.
"Can't let you go," Michelangelo explained. "You would tell about us."
"I wouldn't," she said, but he didn't seem to believe her. "What do you plan to do with me, then, after I help you with the Mousers?"
"Probably kill you." He pushed a plastic bucket of surprisingly fresh and delicious fruit towards her, with a precise and almost gentle gesture. "Sorry."
After feeding her, Michelangelo let her clean up in a bathroom that was nicer than the one she had at home. It was warm, richly tiled, and furnished with both a generously-sized shower stall and a frankly enormous bathtub.
She could tell that one or another of the Turtles was guarding the door at all times. She didn't feel the least bit bad for making them wait a long time. When she finally emerged, Michelangelo was leaning against the wall. It was becoming obvious that he was running interference for her, playing good cop, trying to secure her help through carrots rather than sticks.
"I know what you're doing," she said, but he only looked at her innocently. "I'm tired," she tried instead, and he showed her to a small room with a pile of blankets on the floor.
After that she was left alone. She didn't intend to fall asleep, but she couldn't stay awake.