Never-NeverLand – Chapter 7
Pipes extended her leg in front of her and twined the bright orange bandana down her calf in a criss-cross pattern. She left small tassles at her heel where she tied it off. Smiling softly, she waved her sisters into a huddle and whispers filled the van. Cabbage giggled and Shima nodded. Sterling gave a thumbs up and huddle was broken.
The guys exchanged nervous glances.
Pipes sat on Michelangelo's far side. She beckoned Cabbage over to sit at his other shoulder. Shima and Sterling sat back to back against the van door. Sterling extended her arm, and Shima calmly began dragging her fingernails up and down the inside of her sister's wrist.
Mike nearly jumped out of his shell when Cabbage and Pipes laid their hands on his shoulders and began to roll his muscles in the same rhythm under their warm fingers. Leonardo watched with his mouth hanging open as his brother turned to jell-o. "But he LOST, you don't have to give him a massage!" Leo clung to his concept of the rules; he couldn't think of any other reason why Mikey would be getting a rub down. "Why are you…?" He gestured.
Cabbage and Pipes smiled at each other, +"Because we WANT to,"+ they purred in unison. Mike's eyes flew wide open and then rolled back into his head.
+"Shhh. Relax, silly. You're tensing again."+ Mike's smile could have illuminated entire continents.
Shima spoke softly, "In the same vein, we've decided that bet only exempts us from telling embarrassing stories. The one behind Pipes' hands is not embarrassing, and I do agree with Pipes that the contest was not a fair one. So if you don't mind, I'd like to tell the story I promised back when Cabbage first woke Pipes."
Mikey groaned happily. Cabbage smiled, "Just got a knot out."
Raph shook his head and covered his eyes.
Donnie smirked, jealous of the attentions that Mike was enjoying. "Sure, a story without humiliation sounds grand."
Shima smiled, keeping the rhythm of her light scratches up and down her sister's arm, she began.
"The humans decided that Pipes would study the fine arts. Not just the visual arts, with its painting and sculpting and potting and drafting, but the musical arts as well. When she was very young, they set her to learning instruments and music theory. Unfortunately, I'm sure you've noticed that our anatomy does not lend itself to playing human instruments." Shima lifted her free hand and wiggled three, thin, tapered fingers.
"For the most part, having three fingers didn't hamper our training. However, Pipes suffered no end of difficulties. They fitted the ends of her fingers with extensions, double-pronged fake fingernails when she learned to play guitar. She received longer extensions that forked at a wider angle for when she was taught piano."
Shima could tell her audience did not understand. "Even human children, with the proper number of fingers and good teachers, can suffer physical damage from repetitive strain in their hands and wrists. Instruments and chords are often set up with complete disregard for fundamental concerns: 'do joints actually bend that way?,' 'can a normal person reach both of those keys at once?,' 'how quickly should I be able to do that?' Humans start their children to learning instruments young, not just because their minds are more receptive, but because while children are young, their bones are still soft. To pick an instrument at random for an example, let's say the piano; the child will have to work for years to slowly deform their hands for the sake of 'reach' on a piano (the number of keys your hand can span from thumb tip to pinky tip). A child can undergo irreparable damage if their instructors are not attentive enough.
We were not children; we were mutants.
Human children are not expected to make the progress that my sister made in the short time that Pipes was given. Simply put: by the time she was ten, my sister's hands were almost useless. The cartilage in her joints had eroded. Her tendons were in a constant state of irritation. Her wrists were swollen from carpal tunnel syndrome. She was in almost constant pain. However, if you gave her enough morphine, she could and did play beautifully in spite of all that."
"The problem took on significant proportions when her handicap began to interfere with her ability to make money in other ways. Her musical compositions sold well, and her recorded performance of them was essential. The money lay in fact that no one could prove the purchaser hadn't composed the piece. They couldn't be sold as authorless pieces if someone had to be commissioned to play them. However, even though her music sold well, paintings, prints, and sculpture sold for better prices. The very things her abused hands were no longer able to produce."
"At ten years of age, the rest of us were beginning to earn our keep. I had an office and a desk where I sat for nine hours a day translating various scientific papers from English to their German, Spanish, French, or Japanese equivalents. Cabbage had two years of basic lab work and autopsy experience under her belt. Heck, even Sterling was apprenticed to a soon-to-be retired TGRI Grounds and Electric Maintenance member. It was finally looking like we could relax. We were making steady progress on our debt to TGRI, and our daily cost of living was being covered by what we earned."
"Then Pipes' hands just fell apart. The bones began to fuse together. The tendons were disintegrating. She had developed a highly localized palsy in her wrist and hands." Shima paused. "Tremors. Shakes. You know, spasms."
Pipes made the time-out 'T.' +"Leo?"+
"Huh?"
Cabbage moved over close to Pipes. "Would you like to be next?"
Mikey made feeble protests as his handmaidens moved on to sit by his brother, but moving took so much effort.
Pipes and Cabbage exchanged some winks and ambiguous hand signs and settled themselves around Leo. They made as if to sit cross-legged right by his shoulders, but each only tucked one leg in and extended the other bent at the knee. Leo looked down to find himself flanked by a pair of dark green legs: one with light green stripes, the other with golden. He felt Cabbage take his hand, and Pipes take the other.
"Relax, Leonardo," Cabbage murmured.
"Relax, Leonardo," Pipes echoed her sister perfectly only a heartbeat later. They drew lazy circles on his palms and lines up and down his fingers. Leo's initial panic subsided. This was nice.
Shima smiled, "May I continue?"
"By all means."
"By all means."
"You know that's creepy, right?"
"Yes."
"Yes."
"Ok. Good." Shima resumed petting Sterling's wrist, even though Sterling had obviously fallen asleep. "Basically, Pipes had two choices. The first was to continue to watch her hands degenerate and condemn her entire family to death because the humans would not allow a group with a freeloader to live. The second was to volunteer to be a test subject for some newly created technology: neuro-wire implants. To her credit, Pipes did not hesitate to volunteer. However, there are several reasons why she would have if it had not been a matter of life and death."
"The nuero-wire was not compatible with most blood types. In order to keep your body from rejecting the wire, the subject was placed an extreme immuno-repressive drug regime. Since her immune system was rendered useless by the drug, it couldn't attack the wires and cause fevers or lymphatic swelling. Unfortunately, that meant it also couldn't protect her from even the mildest of bacteria."
Donatello shuddered. "Like volunteering to contract AIDS."
Shima nodded. "Yes. Except in this case, Pipes was not infected with an unstoppable virus, she was just dosed with drugs. She's not contagious, and never was. Also, since she's no longer taking the drugs, her immune system is currently working just fine."
Raphael relaxed and released a breath he didn't know he'd been holding.
Shima continued. "It's actually standard procedure for any kind of implant or transplant. I assure you, if we thought we were a health threat in anyway shape or form, we would have brought that up before your sensei adopted us."
"Beyond the drugs, the wires themselves are painful to use until your body has integrated them properly. It's like trying to grow a clock. Until the gears are all at the right alignment and position, any motion just causes grinding and damage. In this case, the damage is to any tissue that may have tried to grow around the wire. Since movement is so detrimental to the healing process, and any motion, no matter how casual, can cause damage, nuero-wire heals over obscenely long stretches of time."
"Prolonged disuse becomes a factor. Muscles begin to atrophy, or waste away when they should be growing. Physical rehabilitation is not only painful but entirely necessary."
"Finally, all of this came at a time when the review board looked over our budget and announced that healthy mutants did not require so much funding for drugs. Pipes had become addicted to daily morphine injections, and suddenly there were none."
Donatello's eye ridges rose, "Morphine withdrawal?" He looked at Pipes with new respect. "How old were you?"
+"About ten or eleven. Life sucked pretty hard for a while there. Thankfully I was allotted a small dose of morphine daily after the surgery, just like all the other volunteers. It helped ease the transition a bit."+
Cabbage muttered loudly, "A bit! Girl, they transferred you to a separate room and strapped you to a bed for a month. With that damn immuno-repression drug in your system, they could have killed you with bedsores alone. It's no wonder that Perry's long-term sedative turns your brain to sludge. Between the childhood morphine addiction, the months of immuno-repressive drug treatment, the heavy-duty antibiotics required to keep you health in your immune system's absence, and the following years of anti-inflammatory drug treatments for the joints in your hands, your body has dealt with more drugs than a Betty Ford Clinic. I'm surprised you have any gray matter LEFT." Cabbage growled under her breath, "Fucking humans." She quickly looked over her shoulder to make sure Casey hadn't heard her. Satisfied that there was no response, she returned to kneading the muscles in Leo's arm.
Pipes shook her head slowly. Her grin was lop-sided as she looked to Shima. The two of them spoke in unison, +"That which doesn't kill you, makes you stronger."+
Cabbage glared at them. "That which doesn't kill you, makes you STRANGER." Her eyes rested on Pipes' hands, but Pipes just shrugged.
Pipes and Cabbage had slowly worked up Leo's forearms and were started on his biceps. He was getting nervous again.
Cabbage sighed. "Leo, this is supposed to feel good. If it doesn't, Pipes and I can stop. If it does, then I want you to RELAX."
Leo made an effort to relax.
Pipes chuckled and spoke in a thick German accent. +"Repeat afta me: zee Mah-zahdj ist mein frend."+
Cabbage giggled and repeated, "The massage is my friend."
+"Zee Mah-zahdj ist naught unt BEEG Ha-Ree schpy-Der."+
"The massage is not a big hairy spider."
+"Zee Mah-zahdj vill naught lock me up undst trow me in zee bazement."+
"The massage will not lock me up and throw me in the basement."
Raphael grinned as his pain-in-the-ass brother slowly let down his guard and relaxed under his sisters' hands. 'Well, what do you know? They actually got him smiling. I never figured he'd let himself enjoy it. And here I thought you couldn't pull a needle out of that guy's ass with a tractor. Maybe Leo ain't so uptight after all.'
Donatello cleared his throat, "So Cabbage, how did you fit in with this nuero-wire project?"
Cabbage smiled sadly, "It was the first experimental surgery I ever designed and performed."