Next Generation - Romea - by Red Turtle
Just to clarify, the characters of Nadia, Romea and Rowdie are inspired by the fox people depicted in the Archie comic, which I enjoyed reading. With in that, Raphael used to date a fox named Ninjara, and there was speculation about the lifetimes of the two, and that the romance would not last because Ninjara would die much sooner than Raph. All this obviously impacted me and plays a role in the story.
Also, I haven't specified the time period this is all taking place. It will become clearer through Romea's telling that we are about thirty or forty years or so in the future. I liked the concept that the turtles didn't have to have children all right away, and having the theory that they would live longer lives allowed them more flexibility in waiting for a world that would accept their children first, so they were all at least in their forties before settling down and having kids. However, its pretty hard to have an accurate portrayal of the future, their are so many possibilities that I could never get into with in this story, so other than the prevalence of mutants in the world I try to keep aspects of social life, technology, culture, art, language, ect. pretty much as they are now, even though that's pretty unlikely in thirty or more years.
I continue to be impressed by the reviews this has spawned.
And now for the heart of the story:
This night is so strange.
The littleuns are all scared about something. They haven't talked about it but their fear courses through me as a low current of electricity, leaving my fur in a slight state of edginess.
Thank god Mom and Dad will come home tomorrow. And Uncle Leo and Aunt Ronique. I miss them so much.
But tonight I must be content with the company of the maids and my siblings. I think I'm closure to the maids sometimes. At least were both mammals.
Even my own twin brother is a reptile. A turtle, like all the rest but me, Rowdie and Mom, and Rowdie has turtle DNA in him even if he doesn't look it. And besides that, Julian and the others are all mutants, where as Mom and I are descended from an ancient line of fox-people. We have a whole culture, history and everything, although we only became connected with the human (and turtle) world in the last twenty years.
Still more isolation in that I am female. It is quite heavy on the boy side, the fact that most of the mothers left us doesn't help either. I feel separated from the other siblings by it, all but Julian. Julian being a boy and me a girl is the most obviousness of our differences, yet I almost feel the more closure to him because of it. It sort of completes our opposites in a way that unites us; to me it makes us a sort of Yin and Yang. I know other fraternal twins that aren't as close as us, but they are human and have yet more freedom than we have. And they have a way different family set up. There are times when I feel as if the whole world is against Julian and I, and we only survive by being twins.
I share with Julian that we are the only two members of the family to be clones. I learned this when Julian and I were thirteen, that we were clones of our parents so that they could have children. Uncle Don actually created us; I guess that kind of made him our Dad too. None of the other children are clones, even the identical twin sets aren't clones of each other. I didn't use to feel weirded out by it, but after seeing that 1990s' movie The City of Lost Children I can't help but think I am different.
There is one more element to this. Reptiles live a long time. Mutagen increases that lifetime. My father is over fifty years old, yet he is as healthy and active as a twenty year old human. My mother is in her mid thirties and already shows the strains of age. She won't be able to keep fighting past forty, and our lifetime ends around fifty. I am her clone. Julian is my fathers. That means that I will die much sooner than my twin.
I love Julian. He's the only one of the family I am close to at all, in fact in the whole world. I haven't even had a boyfriend, but that's not unusual in this human dominated country. The boys that approach me don't understand me, the ones I like are scared I will eat them or something. That was quite literally the fear of Jimmy the Rabbit, who I tried to ask out. By now the myth dominates that Julian and I are our own couple, and we have no friends to disway them, so it continues. It has the additional affect of making us bitter towards them, and to our other siblings, and thus our oneness is reinforced.
At this point this will only break when we go to college. Separate colleges. I have already decided. I major in music, and plan to excel in it until my death. It will allow me to leave something worthwhile on this world. My skill is with a unique instrument, a type of violin which is designed for us fox people. It holds in my hands unlike the human version, and it has a different string design to play notes that foxes hear, but not humans. Uncle Leo was upset at my decision to channel my energy into this, but my heart lies with this music and not ninjitzu. He tried so hard to enforce his own lifestyle on us, me, Julian, his son and all the others, to recreate what our fathers all went through growing up, but it is not possible. We have freedom they never could imagine in their childhood, and until recently we didn't have a reason to practice like they did.
It is only because of uncle Don's murder that I submit to the daily ninjitzu practice. I intended to give it up long ago, but decided that this needed to be seen through, at least until I move out. It's not the worst thing in the world anyway; it is a useful skill and should serve me well some day.
A noise pricks my ears. A gasp or almost a cry. I suddenly realize how intense the atmosphere has become. The fear of the littleuns I had grown accustomed to, although it disturbed me. It wasn't like this last year, the last anniversary had passed sadly but with out incident. This time seems different. Now I sense a new disturbance.
I know only that it's not Julian. My own senses know him well enough, and he is asleep in the room next to mine.
My ears instinctively tune into the hallway outside, to figure out what's happening. Possibly it is a sibling or cousin come to approach me about the tenseness of the situation. But no, it passes my door.
This isn't right. Although it would seem I don't have to, I must do something to resolve all this anxiety. I wish I had thought ahead of time and tried to get my parents back earlier, we would all be so much more comfortable with them around.
I open my door and see Christopher going down the stairs. I follow, he is too far ahead for me to call to him, and I don't want the others to hear me, because I don't want to scare them with why I am roaming around in the middle of the night.
I loose sight of where he went downstairs. But then I hear him from the den. He must be using the phone. Who is he calling at this time of night?
"Master Sheno, this is Christopher. You need to come here right away. Please call as soon as you receive this message."
My fur bristles up fully. Why call Master Sheno? What's going on?
Before I interrupt, he is on his own communicator, which we all carry. Sort of an evolution of cell phones, but much more advanced.
"Mom, Dad, contact me as soon as you get this. We need you here (he takes a shaky sigh) now. Please. Hurry."
He turns it off, tucks it back in his belt and covers his mouth...is he crying?
"What's wrong, Christopher?" I inquire, stepping into the room.
"Shit...Romea", he exclaims, apparently I startled him. He grabs me, half comfortingly, and half in fear. His face brightens a little at my appearance.
"You're all puffed", he states.
"I know. I can feel it", I reply dryly.
Not having fur themselves, all the turtles love to see me "puffed"; they think it's quite hysterical. Christopher himself went through a period, from when he was about twelve to fifteen, where he would almost every day try to set traps for me and make me puff up, and when he succeeded he would laugh for days. The fact that the sight of me doesn't bring a smile further impressed upon me how serious this situation was, and I don't even know what is happening.
"We need to call your parents", he says. His voice quivers.
"What's going on?"
He signs, almost a groan, and beckons me to follow him. We arrive outside his room.
"Listen...don't scream", he tells me before opening the door.
"I'm not a screamer, am I?" I reply, a little insulted.
"Just don't", he insists.
The door opens. He goes in first, and leads me to his bed.
It took a minute to realize what was on his bed, so I was in no danger of screaming then. But upon seeing what lay there, a door seemed to open up inside my mind, that I had to shut quickly or my scream would have escaped.
It was a rat. A huge dead rat which had not died by natural means upon Chris' bed. It bore several small wounds, as if someone had shot it with a pellet gun.
"It has", Chris started to say and then lost his voice a minute, "It has the same exact gun shot wounds that uncle Don had", he explained.
This I actually didn't know, since I didn't have any reason to examine uncle Don's murder from that aspect. But Chris would have them memorized. He had devoted a lot of his life to helping his father investigate that side of the murder to learn what weapon and from where.
"You just found it...here?" I clarified.
"Yes. Romea, someone came into my room and did this, someone very familiar with the assassination, probably the very one who did the assassination, and they just came in here."
"No tracks?" I asked him.
"I actually...as soon as I saw it and knew what it was I called Master Sheno and Dad. We need them here tonight. We can't do this ourselves. Can you call you parents too?"
I nodded and took out my communicator. I wasn't expecting to reach them though, since he hadn't reached his Dad. It was two hours later where they were. We didn't have an emergency signal or anything; such a simple thing was never worked out. I left a message similar to the one Chris left.
"Let's get Julian, and the others, and have us all stay in one room together", Chris suggested.
"The littleuns are already scared", I told him, "They'll appreciate the company. We'll all go the den, and we can watch movies together. Donatello and William should be told about this though."
"I don't think so...they're so young and this is their Dad...why don't we wait to tell them until our parents are back to help?"
"Fine", I agreed.
We left his room and together went to Julian's. I knocked at the door but received no answer. Not wanting to wake the children before necessary, and since I had privilege of being a twin, I quietly opened the door.
"Julian", I whispered.
There was no answer, and my senses tried to tell me something. I turned on the lights.
Julian's room was worse than Christopher's.
Julian's room was empty.
Just to clarify, the characters of Nadia, Romea and Rowdie are inspired by the fox people depicted in the Archie comic, which I enjoyed reading. With in that, Raphael used to date a fox named Ninjara, and there was speculation about the lifetimes of the two, and that the romance would not last because Ninjara would die much sooner than Raph. All this obviously impacted me and plays a role in the story.
Also, I haven't specified the time period this is all taking place. It will become clearer through Romea's telling that we are about thirty or forty years or so in the future. I liked the concept that the turtles didn't have to have children all right away, and having the theory that they would live longer lives allowed them more flexibility in waiting for a world that would accept their children first, so they were all at least in their forties before settling down and having kids. However, its pretty hard to have an accurate portrayal of the future, their are so many possibilities that I could never get into with in this story, so other than the prevalence of mutants in the world I try to keep aspects of social life, technology, culture, art, language, ect. pretty much as they are now, even though that's pretty unlikely in thirty or more years.
I continue to be impressed by the reviews this has spawned.
And now for the heart of the story:
This night is so strange.
The littleuns are all scared about something. They haven't talked about it but their fear courses through me as a low current of electricity, leaving my fur in a slight state of edginess.
Thank god Mom and Dad will come home tomorrow. And Uncle Leo and Aunt Ronique. I miss them so much.
But tonight I must be content with the company of the maids and my siblings. I think I'm closure to the maids sometimes. At least were both mammals.
Even my own twin brother is a reptile. A turtle, like all the rest but me, Rowdie and Mom, and Rowdie has turtle DNA in him even if he doesn't look it. And besides that, Julian and the others are all mutants, where as Mom and I are descended from an ancient line of fox-people. We have a whole culture, history and everything, although we only became connected with the human (and turtle) world in the last twenty years.
Still more isolation in that I am female. It is quite heavy on the boy side, the fact that most of the mothers left us doesn't help either. I feel separated from the other siblings by it, all but Julian. Julian being a boy and me a girl is the most obviousness of our differences, yet I almost feel the more closure to him because of it. It sort of completes our opposites in a way that unites us; to me it makes us a sort of Yin and Yang. I know other fraternal twins that aren't as close as us, but they are human and have yet more freedom than we have. And they have a way different family set up. There are times when I feel as if the whole world is against Julian and I, and we only survive by being twins.
I share with Julian that we are the only two members of the family to be clones. I learned this when Julian and I were thirteen, that we were clones of our parents so that they could have children. Uncle Don actually created us; I guess that kind of made him our Dad too. None of the other children are clones, even the identical twin sets aren't clones of each other. I didn't use to feel weirded out by it, but after seeing that 1990s' movie The City of Lost Children I can't help but think I am different.
There is one more element to this. Reptiles live a long time. Mutagen increases that lifetime. My father is over fifty years old, yet he is as healthy and active as a twenty year old human. My mother is in her mid thirties and already shows the strains of age. She won't be able to keep fighting past forty, and our lifetime ends around fifty. I am her clone. Julian is my fathers. That means that I will die much sooner than my twin.
I love Julian. He's the only one of the family I am close to at all, in fact in the whole world. I haven't even had a boyfriend, but that's not unusual in this human dominated country. The boys that approach me don't understand me, the ones I like are scared I will eat them or something. That was quite literally the fear of Jimmy the Rabbit, who I tried to ask out. By now the myth dominates that Julian and I are our own couple, and we have no friends to disway them, so it continues. It has the additional affect of making us bitter towards them, and to our other siblings, and thus our oneness is reinforced.
At this point this will only break when we go to college. Separate colleges. I have already decided. I major in music, and plan to excel in it until my death. It will allow me to leave something worthwhile on this world. My skill is with a unique instrument, a type of violin which is designed for us fox people. It holds in my hands unlike the human version, and it has a different string design to play notes that foxes hear, but not humans. Uncle Leo was upset at my decision to channel my energy into this, but my heart lies with this music and not ninjitzu. He tried so hard to enforce his own lifestyle on us, me, Julian, his son and all the others, to recreate what our fathers all went through growing up, but it is not possible. We have freedom they never could imagine in their childhood, and until recently we didn't have a reason to practice like they did.
It is only because of uncle Don's murder that I submit to the daily ninjitzu practice. I intended to give it up long ago, but decided that this needed to be seen through, at least until I move out. It's not the worst thing in the world anyway; it is a useful skill and should serve me well some day.
A noise pricks my ears. A gasp or almost a cry. I suddenly realize how intense the atmosphere has become. The fear of the littleuns I had grown accustomed to, although it disturbed me. It wasn't like this last year, the last anniversary had passed sadly but with out incident. This time seems different. Now I sense a new disturbance.
I know only that it's not Julian. My own senses know him well enough, and he is asleep in the room next to mine.
My ears instinctively tune into the hallway outside, to figure out what's happening. Possibly it is a sibling or cousin come to approach me about the tenseness of the situation. But no, it passes my door.
This isn't right. Although it would seem I don't have to, I must do something to resolve all this anxiety. I wish I had thought ahead of time and tried to get my parents back earlier, we would all be so much more comfortable with them around.
I open my door and see Christopher going down the stairs. I follow, he is too far ahead for me to call to him, and I don't want the others to hear me, because I don't want to scare them with why I am roaming around in the middle of the night.
I loose sight of where he went downstairs. But then I hear him from the den. He must be using the phone. Who is he calling at this time of night?
"Master Sheno, this is Christopher. You need to come here right away. Please call as soon as you receive this message."
My fur bristles up fully. Why call Master Sheno? What's going on?
Before I interrupt, he is on his own communicator, which we all carry. Sort of an evolution of cell phones, but much more advanced.
"Mom, Dad, contact me as soon as you get this. We need you here (he takes a shaky sigh) now. Please. Hurry."
He turns it off, tucks it back in his belt and covers his mouth...is he crying?
"What's wrong, Christopher?" I inquire, stepping into the room.
"Shit...Romea", he exclaims, apparently I startled him. He grabs me, half comfortingly, and half in fear. His face brightens a little at my appearance.
"You're all puffed", he states.
"I know. I can feel it", I reply dryly.
Not having fur themselves, all the turtles love to see me "puffed"; they think it's quite hysterical. Christopher himself went through a period, from when he was about twelve to fifteen, where he would almost every day try to set traps for me and make me puff up, and when he succeeded he would laugh for days. The fact that the sight of me doesn't bring a smile further impressed upon me how serious this situation was, and I don't even know what is happening.
"We need to call your parents", he says. His voice quivers.
"What's going on?"
He signs, almost a groan, and beckons me to follow him. We arrive outside his room.
"Listen...don't scream", he tells me before opening the door.
"I'm not a screamer, am I?" I reply, a little insulted.
"Just don't", he insists.
The door opens. He goes in first, and leads me to his bed.
It took a minute to realize what was on his bed, so I was in no danger of screaming then. But upon seeing what lay there, a door seemed to open up inside my mind, that I had to shut quickly or my scream would have escaped.
It was a rat. A huge dead rat which had not died by natural means upon Chris' bed. It bore several small wounds, as if someone had shot it with a pellet gun.
"It has", Chris started to say and then lost his voice a minute, "It has the same exact gun shot wounds that uncle Don had", he explained.
This I actually didn't know, since I didn't have any reason to examine uncle Don's murder from that aspect. But Chris would have them memorized. He had devoted a lot of his life to helping his father investigate that side of the murder to learn what weapon and from where.
"You just found it...here?" I clarified.
"Yes. Romea, someone came into my room and did this, someone very familiar with the assassination, probably the very one who did the assassination, and they just came in here."
"No tracks?" I asked him.
"I actually...as soon as I saw it and knew what it was I called Master Sheno and Dad. We need them here tonight. We can't do this ourselves. Can you call you parents too?"
I nodded and took out my communicator. I wasn't expecting to reach them though, since he hadn't reached his Dad. It was two hours later where they were. We didn't have an emergency signal or anything; such a simple thing was never worked out. I left a message similar to the one Chris left.
"Let's get Julian, and the others, and have us all stay in one room together", Chris suggested.
"The littleuns are already scared", I told him, "They'll appreciate the company. We'll all go the den, and we can watch movies together. Donatello and William should be told about this though."
"I don't think so...they're so young and this is their Dad...why don't we wait to tell them until our parents are back to help?"
"Fine", I agreed.
We left his room and together went to Julian's. I knocked at the door but received no answer. Not wanting to wake the children before necessary, and since I had privilege of being a twin, I quietly opened the door.
"Julian", I whispered.
There was no answer, and my senses tried to tell me something. I turned on the lights.
Julian's room was worse than Christopher's.
Julian's room was empty.