Donatello squirmed as Leonardo sat with hands folded under his beak, eyes flicking back and forth with his racing thoughts. April stood nearby, arms crossed, waiting for him to finish processing the new information. Donnie really wished she hadn't made him spill. "He has a right to know Don." He was still fighting with how much this had stirred up his own feelings, and Leon was much more emotionally driven.
"So, Donnie and I were made with the DNA of two humans?" the striped turtle finally said from behind his hands, eyes now closed.
Their closest friend gave the softshell a little kick. "Uh yes," he stuttered to life, "we had two DNA donors. Dad and a woman. Who she was and how Draxum, obtained her DNA, I don't know. His tech refuses to talk to mine except for the odd fragment of data I can glean from all the gibberish."
Leo dropped one hand while massaging his forehead with the other. Has he always had wrinkles there? "Draxum had access to the internet, right?"
The non sequitur stopped Donatello's thoughts in their tracks. "I'm sorry?"
"Internet access," his brother continued, "I know he didn't think much of human knowledge, but even he needed to look up things about the human world sometimes. Like where stuff was or materials available, etc." He looked up. "We know Draxum didn't have any human tech so, he must have used some sort of adaptor or interface, right?"
Donatello was absolutely poleaxed. Weeks of work. "I hate you."
His brother smirked, though the look in his eyes hinted at a budding migraine. "Where's Barry's crap?"
The elder led his brother in blue and best friend over to a pile of boxes, stomping all the way. They spent the next hour or so sifting through the collection of yokai artifacts, tech and nick knacks that their maker had managed to carry through his long life, despite its many upheavals. Don squinted at another item then added it to the "maybe" pile. Turning the next over in his hand he was startled to see a USB port, then an ethernet port and a …. Is that for a telephone jack? "Got it!" he yelled from behind the box pyramid, prize held high in his hand.
Scrambling around the mess they'd created, trampling ….. stepping around his brother in the process, Don flung himself back into his chair, already hooking the adaptor up. Once connected, his tech began flashing through the ancient archive at high speed, rapidly translating from old, formal Japanese to the romanji that Dontello was more comfortable with. Slapping Leo's hand away from the cracker stacks April had brought in earlier, Don grabbed one for himself; munching away while he dug through the records in search of his previously unknown DNA donor. Though I suppose donor is probably a generous word for it.
"There." Leo pointed out, getting a smudged fingerprint on the otherwise pristine screen. Once or twice, Draxum had accidentally referred to the brothers by the project designations he'd originally given them all. In front of them now, was a file index labelled with those very terms.
Selecting the files, Donatello began speed reading faster than Leo could keep up with; April leaving unnoticed. After a few minutes, Leonardo gave up and sat in the nest of beanbags that Don kept for "pondering".
His first run through complete, Donnie went back up to the top and started reading it all again more slowly. The young genius admired the thoroughness of his predecessor's notes and meticulous methods but his horror at the real world implications was making his churning stomach slowly crawl up his throat. Shouldn't have had the crackers.
Absently, he noted the rest of his family entering his lab, a low chatter with Leon starting up. This set Donatello's anxiety ratcheting up as he realized he was going to have to explain this horror show to his entire clan. A desire to just let them read it themselves was ruthlessly throttled down because even he knew that he couldn't expose Mikey and Raph to the full unsanitized account of events. Angelo in particular would never fully recover.
After taking a moment to collect himself, and to cross his arms with hands stuck under his elbows to hide their shaking, Don turned to rip their world apart.
"What'd you find Donnie?" Oh Raph. You really don't want to know. He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth. Alright, once more unto the breach. "Well. We already knew that Draxum essentially made us to be super soldiers in his bid to wipe out humanity," he began.
Mikey just had to pipe up. "Yeah, but that was just 'cause humans wiped out his clan back in Japan." He sniffled a bit, "But we showed him how humans can be good, and he changed." The little box turtle turned to April. "He really liked you, y'know?" Their adoptive sister smiled down at him.
Please stop defending him Mikey. Please, please, please. Don fought against the tic trying to break free in his jaw. "Yes, well, back then he still very much hated them. So, he concocted this plan. Again, we already knew that he saw Papa fighting in the Nexus Arena and decided he would be the ideal specimen to give his turtle soldiers the necessary physicality to serve their purpose."
"At least he had a good eye." Splinter smirked at his sons.
Leo definitely gets that from Dad. Annoyance at being interrupted doing something difficult was starting to build in the purple softshell. "Right. Anyway, the yokai have a method for combining otherwise incompatible DNA that they've already been using for centuries." He leaned back, trying to relax a little. "When yokai that are of too different kinds wish to have a child one of them would produce an embryo with a donor of their own kind, then DNA from the other parent would be grafted in. The resulting child, genetically, has three parents. The original two and the one that was grafted in. This is the method that Draxum used to make Raph and Mikey."
The two mentioned looked at each other for a moment. "So, we're the kids of Dad and our turtle parents?" Raphael asked.
Ok, they're following along so far. That helps. "Basically." He glanced at the records just to refresh his memory and instantly regretted it. "That's not what he did with Nardo and I though. Remember we were basically prototypes. He wanted to make a whole army of super soldiers, which would require mass production." April shuddered a little. Clever girl. "But the traditional yokai method would be inefficient. The genes need a few generations to …. settle, before they can be altered again, and a normal embryo was required to produce a viable lifeform. This means either he'd have to keep a breeding stock of every kind of animal he wished to use around for a steady source of embryos, or use yokai, which he considered immoral." Leo's disgusted huff clearly indicated what he thought of that.
Keeping a careful eye on his slider brother, Donatello continued. "Therefore, with Leo and I, he decided to try something experimental. This new method would result in a genetically stable lifeform, so he planned to just continue breeding or even cloning them depending on their individual performance." Everyone present looked disturbed now, realizing that Draxum had essentially planned to create a race of tailor made war slaves. Mikey especially appeared deeply conflicted about what they'd just learned about their maker.
Now for the hard part. "With this technique he would take two normal lifeforms, split them at the subatomic level and then graft them together. The resulting creature would be the child of four parents. For us it was our slider and softshell parents, then Dad and a woman that he had picked earlier. This means also came with the advantage of being able to select for parentage with more desired traits." He held out one hand. "The attributes of our turtle parents," and the other, "the physical acumen of Dad and the intelligence of a woman that he had selected at an earlier date."
Leo and April wore twin expressions of dawning horror, telling Donnie that they'd already figured it out. "Donnie," Leonardo slowly drew out, "when you say two normal lifeforms….."
Donatello quickly ground out revolting answer. "He combined a sperm sample from Dad with eggs he harvested from our mother to make a human embryo. Accelerated its growth until he had a human baby then split the baby and his selected turtles to recombine them into us." He met Leo's eyes, flashing with echoed hatred. "We began life as literally the same person."
Leonardo rumbled with a hiss, "And he murdered us."
