The next time the girl came back to the land of the living, she'd been asleep for a day and a half. Michelangelo grumbled a bit at first about his ejection from the couch, but extra solitary practices from Master Splinter put a stop to that very quickly. Leonardo and Michelangelo were sparring in the chamber, while Donatello worked on the devices, almost tirelessly. Raphael worked over a punching bag with much gusto. Leonardo had set up the bamboo sticks again, practicing balancing while moving on the unsteady sticks. Occasionally Michelangelo would throw something at him for fun to see him dodge it. Eventually, Leonardo got fed up with the flying missiles, and he caught the last one that Michelangelo threw and boomeranged it back at him, hitting his unsuspecting victim in the head. Michelangelo retaliated by leaping up to the bamboo sticks, and pulled out his nun chucks.

"Ok, Leo. Let's dance!" He shouted, enjoying the moment.

Leonardo pulled out his double Katanas, twirling them a bit, and said, "You sure you're up to it, Mikey boy? You couldn't balance on a rock!"

Michelangelo responded by leaping towards his green brother and nun chucked the bamboo stick he stood on, making it wiggle enough that it forced Leonardo to jump and find another bamboo stick to balance on.

"Yo bro, you're too slow!" Michelangelo taunted.

"Enough!" Splinter called to the two spatting brothers. "The girl awakens."

Leonardo gave Michelangelo a hard shove, and in order to recover himself, Michelangelo did a back flip, landing on two bamboo sticks. "Hey!"

The two brothers spatted all the way up to the couch, where the girl stretched and yawned, and the other's had already gathered. Splinter brought her a nice hot cup of tea. The girl accepted it, and sat up. After taking a sip or two of the brew, she let out a long breath.

"How long have I been out?" She asked with a small voice.

They hesitated. Didn't she notice that they were not, well, normal? She looked at them as if she were not afraid, nor even questioned it.

Finally Donatello spoke up. "Nearly two days,"

She rolled her eyes, and muttered to herself, "Geeze, you'd think my body would be tired of sleeping by now…"

The five looked at each other in confusion. "Uh, come again?" Raphael asked.

The girl looked up at him with intense eyes. "It was how he controlled me. He couldn't get me to surrender to his mind-washing, so he kept me in a state of constant unconsciousness so that I would do his bidding."

Another pause. Did this girl speak in riddles because she enjoyed it?

Fed up with the riddles—he got enough of those from Splinter—Michelangelo inquired, "Who is 'he'?"

The girl shrugged, her face becoming troubled. "I don't know who he is. He wouldn't ever tell me his name. Whenever I'd ask him who he was, he'd always tell me to call him 'father.'" She shook her head. "But I already had a father. I refused."

Splinter spoke up, "What is your name, young one?"

The girl smiled for the first time. "I knew you were going to ask me that. It's Ryanne."

Something nagged Donatello. "Hang on," he said in a confused voice. "The first time you woke up, you told us that you knew us. And just now, you said that you knew that Master Splinter would ask for your name… how?"

Ryanne smiled ironically. "It's the reason he kidnapped me in the first place." She sighed and rubbed her forehead. "Actually, it's a very long story."

Michelangelo jumped up. "I'm all over that!" (He liked long stories.) In less than a second he'd parked it in front of her as if it were story time. The others settled in, and Raphael said, "We ain't goin' nowhere."

The girl took a last sip of the delicious tea, and set down the cup. "Alright, then." She brought her legs up in a half criss-cross. She began, "My mother called it a gift. My father called it dangerous. It turned out that they were both right. See, I have something that I call precognition. It's not really like ESP, or stuff like that. It's almost like memories of things that haven't happened yet. For example, I whenever I'd start a new year in school, I'd automatically 'remember' my friends, but people that I'd never met before." She smiled once more, "As you might imagine, I'd always turn away from topics like, 'do you remember how we even met?' I'd never told anyone about my gift. See, aside from the niceties of knowing who your friends are before you even meet them, I'd have to deal with some pretty horrific, detailed dreams. They were always about crime. I won't go into it."

Michelangelo interrupted, "So you'd know if someone was, like, about to rob a bank, or something."

Ryanne nodded. "Yes. And I'd meet these people on the streets as I walked from place to place. I'd 'recognize' them, but really, it was 'precognition.'"

Donatello nodded, "Ah, I see." He'd always had a knack for big words. "So what did you do?"

Ryanne sighed, and looked down. "I was tired of seeing bad things happen. I knew who the people were, but I felt powerless to do anything. I knew it wasn't safe to take matters into my own hands, but… well, I couldn't help myself. As I grew older, I became able to control what I saw. I'd sort of, well… 'ask' my precognition to show me things. Who my new teachers would be, which ones would I like, and stuff like that." She laughed, "Actually, it sort of became somewhat like a game. I'd ask more and more broad questions, like instead of 'who is going to be my next boyfriend,' it became 'who could be my next boyfriend?' Sort of like challenging myself. But really, I only had control of my precognition half of the time. I always saw the crimes. The blood, the fighting, the stealing, the abuse. It was everywhere. It almost ate me up, to see how much hatred people had for each other. But, I got a brilliant notion one day. Why not ask my precognition who I could help that would keep a crime from happening?"

Lights began to turn on for Donatello. "So you helped someone, and they found out about your gift, am I right?"

Ryanne nodded. "Close. I didn't help people on a huge scale right away. Most of the time, I'd just make harmless suggestions, everyday ordinary little statements and stuff. You know, played it on the safe side at first. But I guess you could say I was desperate. When my bad dreams began to happen less and less, I figured it would be ok to do more. I thought that the more I did, the less I would dream about."

Splinter added, "A wise man once said, 'To be a great warrior, one must have balance in all things.' I believe I may be right in saying that you overcompensated."

Ryanne looked at him with a bright expression on her face. "I knew I was going to like you." She joked. But her expression grew dimmer and contemplative, "Yes, you're correct. I overdid it, several times. I was confused, because my precognition had shown me the same man in my dreams over and over again. He was constantly being killed. At first I thought that my dreams were just dreams, and not my gift, but when I saw him in real life, I knew that he was about to die. I was panicked. I'd never had the same person in my dreams die over and over again, and in different ways. I was thinking that if I prevented his death once, the cycle of dreams would stop. I was given the perfect opportunity too. The first time I'd ever watched him die had been an accident—several times he'd been murdered, and one time he killed himself—but I thought that if I could just keep him from dying once, he wouldn't die again. The accident involved a taxi, on the corner of 23rd and Walker. Another aspect of my precognition was that I somehow recognized the time that things were about to happen. I'd just get this very 'familiar' feeling, and I'd just know when something was about to happen. When I felt it this time, I ran to the corner, watching for the man. I spotted him coming down the sidewalk toward the corner where I was standing. He looked very distracted, and not focused on where he was going. He was about to cross the street when I heard the squealing of the wheels of the taxi that had a drunk driver at the wheel. It was going out of control, fish-tailing and swerving. However, it was not in view yet, and it would be too late when it turned around the corner. I did what I had to, to keep the man from being hit. I pulled him away from the curb and down the sidewalk. He struggled and yelled, but I got him away, just in time for the taxi to come careening around the corner, and slam into the side of the building."

Leonardo commented, "So that's when he knew about your gift."

Ryanne shook her head, and rubbed her forehead. "No. I took off before he could ask me anything."

The turtles and the rat were all poised interestedly at the edge of their seats waiting for what happened next. Ryanne paused, gathering her breath. "I should have known, I should have realized what was going on." She gathered her nerve and said, "He wouldn't stop dying in my dreams. He was still going to be killed… and I wanted it to stop. I thought that if I just kept him from dying, one of these times I'd just stop dreaming about it. So I'd find him, and tell him to not go into such-and-such place, to not do such and such a thing, all in an attempt to keep the events that lead up to his death from happening." She left the point out in the open, hoping that someone would see her mistake.

Leonardo picked up on the cue. "And so by keeping the guy alive a little longer, you allowed all the different possibilities of his death to be able to happen."

Ryanne nodded. "Exactly! I'd keep him from dying one way, but there was always another possibility. And so, the inevitable happened. His curiosity got the better—or worse, I should say—of him. There is no 'better' side to this dude. He kidnapped me, to find out how I could possibly know the events in his life. It turned out that he was some brainy scientists dude with a vendetta, and that he figured out how to use me to his advantage. He tried to brainwash me at first, make me love him so that I would do everything in my abilities to keep him alive, and wealthy. When that didn't work, he kept me asleep. It was a perfect condition, actually. All he'd have to do is ask me a question, like "Who is my enemy," and somehow he'd find out. I think he had something attached to my brain that made it possible to see what I was dreaming."

"Hang on a second," Donatello said, "He can't have kept you asleep forever. Eventually your organs would shut down. It's the "Use it or lose it" rule. Atrophy would make your body degenerate."

Ryanne nodded, "Yes, and that's why he'd let me wake up for a while. He set a perimeter around the area I was allowed to go, and if I crossed the boundaries for too long, he'd hurt me. And that's when he'd always try his brainwashing. For some reason, I think my precognition helped keep me safe from that. I don't know how long I lived like this. It's hard to keep track of time when you're asleep. But eventually I figured out how to think while unconscious. I wasn't aware off what was going on around me, but I think my precognition helped me remember that I was asleep. It'd always take me a while to realize that I was dreaming, but when I did, every time he asked me a question about his future, I'd be able to re-ask my precognition differently. Like one time he asked me a question about the best way to go about something he was after. I re-framed the question to 'what is the worst way to go about it?' and my mind would still have those dreams, but they'd tell him wrong. I think he was beginning to figure it out, but I don't know for sure. As soon as I could manage, when he asked me a question, I asked my precognition how I'd be able to find friends to help me out of my situation. It showed me sleep-walking through tunnels. So the man took that to mean that he needed to let me go, and he'd be able to get what he wanted."

Raphael nodded. "And ya found us." He reflected a moment, then said, "And that's it."

Michelangelo got up to his feet, "Yeah, we'll help ya out!"

Suddenly Donatello snapped his fingers. "That's it!"

They all jumped.

"That's what I just said!" Raphael grumbled.

"Ummm, what's it?" Leonardo asked.

Donatello jumped to his feet and made tracks toward his worktable. They all watched him for a second.

"Excuse us for a second," Michelangelo said apologetically to the girl. He got up and plodded to Donatello. The rest followed. Michelangelo tapped Donatello on the shell. Donatello was in the middle of examining one of the devices underneath his magnifying glass, and paid no attention to the tap. Michelangelo tried a different tactic. "Donatelloooo… Donatellooo…. Earth calling Donny."

Donatello shoved Michelangelo away with one hand, and then exclaimed, "Aha!"

Leonardo asked, "So, brainiack, are you going to tell us what you're aha-ing about, or what?"

Donatello spoke up for the first time. Pointing to a little pinpoint in the smooth silver device, he said "That's why I wasn't able to find a signal. I figured it was just because it was removed from the girl's body. But I thought if that was the case then—"

"Yeah yeah, whatever! What did you find out?" Raphael interrupted.

Donatello smiled. "How the shell these little devices were even operating! I was hoping to be able to track down the point of origin using the signal that these devices were supposed to be sending out. Of course I based this on the assumption that they were actually functioning on a remote basis. See, they have no power source, so they had to be drawing power off of something. A remote… but that wasn't it. I just couldn't figure it out. It's actually quite a brilliant little device, or would be if it weren't so nasty. Ryanne said that she was limited to a 'perimeter.' At first I thought it was either a time bomb… if worn too long it would do what it does. But then I realized that it couldn't be, because it has no power source. So I looked for a remote receiver device on the chip installed in this little thing, and nothing. Now I know that what happened was closer to my first assumption. It's a device that senses the electronic field that I imagine was set around her 'perimeter.' Once she crossed it, it set off the time bomb."

Donatello pointed again to the little pinhole in the plastic. "This is where it attaches to the body," He pulled out a pair of miniature tweezers, and pulled down a little micro-wire, "It actually draws the power from the person it's on by dialing into the small electric impulses that our brain sends through our body via our nervous system. Once it is pressed onto the skin, this little wire will reach down and link into the nearest nerve. Rather a neat way to conserve energy, and harmless too."

"Yeah," Leonardo retorted, "harmless until they start wreaking havoc on your body."

Donatello grimaced. "Yeah, they were already linked to the nervous system. All they had to do was re-focus the electric pulses sent by the brain. You know, I bet this is how that guy was able to tap into Ryanne's dreams. Since this thing was already connected to the electric impulses the brain gives out, it wouldn't be hard to hook the device up to a computer, and receive images—"

"I would get rid of those if I were you." Said a girl's voice, behind them.

Everyone jumped, and turned around.

It was Ryanne. She'd come up quietly behind them, observing.

She explained. "The man is definitely not stupid. He wouldn't just let me go without some way to keep tabs on me. What if those devices also let him know where I've gone? Then he'll find me… and you."

Donatello shook his head. "These thing aren't sending a signal. They don't even have an energy signature, because they aren't functioning. They have no power source."

Ryanne nodded. "I understand." She frowned a moment or two. "But still, it doesn't make me feel comfortable. He's too smart! He wouldn't just let me go without having a way to get me back."

Michelangelo took her by the shoulders. "Relax! Even if he did find us, he'd have to walk past four ninja turtles, and a ninjitsu master before getting to you."

"Somehow, I don't find the fact that all he'd have to do to get to me is walk past a few turtles very comforting." Ryanne said.

"Hey, listen, we won't let anything happen to you." Leonardo tried to sound comforting, but his pride had taken a little prick.

Ryanne smiled. "I'm sorry… maybe I'm just paranoid. You would be too, if you had a mad scientist after you."

Splinter's face became thoughtful. "Perhaps you would benefit by learning how to defend yourself against an attacker, should one come upon you."

Ryanne's face lit up. "That would make me feel better." She turned to the turtles. "I want to thank you for everything that you've done for me already. I know that this is not very convenient for you, but I know that you can help." Her smiled turned wry. "By the way, I don't know your names. Just because I recognize faces doesn't mean that I can suddenly remember names."

They obliged.

"I'm Leonardo."

"Donatello."

"Michelangelo."

"And I'm…" he paused for effect. "Raphael."

Michelangelo sniggered. "All the good ones end in 'o'."

Raphael pushed Michelangelo over.

"Ow!"