"Explain to me again why I'm the one doing this," Raphael complained, as he made his way up the manhole. He spoke into a little earpiece connected to their shell cells, cursing Leonardo the whole way up.
"Listen Raph, you're going up because Mikey's no good at this sort of thing." Said the voice in his earpiece. It was Leonardo
"Ha ha." Michelangelo retorted, "Listen to the funny mutant."
"Yeah, sure," Raphael said. "I get to do all the crazy stunts."
"Well, now that you mention it," Leonardo snickered.
"Don't make me come back down there."
"Guys!" Ryanne interrupted. "Couldja quit chatting so Raphael can do his gig here?"
Raphael reached the top of the manhole, and slowly lifted it a few inches, checking to see if anybody was around. "Ok, remind me what it is that I'm supposed to pull off again…"
"Ok, Raph, listen up." It was Donatello. He and the others were currently sitting in the Battle Shell, Donatello sitting at his computer, heading the operation. Donatello had done some scouting, and found the building where the remote signal on his scanner device originated. It was a major company building dealing in the bio-engineering sciences called the BEC. He was able to get his hands on a rough copy of the blueprints and layout to the building, but hadn't managed to hack his way into the security systems data. Donatello told Raphael, "Your job is to go in and create a diversion for Mikey and Leo. You're going to have a wide-angle lens micro-camera on you so that I can see where everything is. The point is to create as much noise as possible so that Leo and Mikey can get to the point of origin. Once they're there, I'll come to get you if you need help, and we'll meet Leo and Mikey at the point of origin."
"You gotta be kiddin' me," Raphael muttered, "I'm a ninja, not a kamikaze." He shook his head. "Leo, why don't we all just get into the building together?"
Leonardo sighed. "Because this building has no outlets to the sewers, and all the doors are locked. Donny says the security code device that turns off the alarms appears to be remote activated, sort of like a garage door. The only way to get in is to break in, and that would set off the alarms anyway."
"So?"
"Think about it for a second! Donny's already completed a scan with our sensors. There are lots of guards. We'd never manage to get to the point of origin together."
"Yeah, so you choose to send me in to get captured!"
"Well, if you are too chicken to do it," Michelangelo taunted, "I could always come and take your place."
"Yeah, right. That's a laugh. You'd botch the whole thing up." Raphael growled.
Donatello made the final arguments. "It's a whole lot easier for one turtle to hide than it is for four. And with me in your ear, I can help guide you past some major obstacles, something that I wouldn't be able to do if we all went together. That, and when I follow up behind you I need to sabotage all of the security cameras, and I won't have time to do that if I'm worried about being hidden." A pause for breath. "Besides. You need the practice."
Raphael, taken aback, said "Moi?" With that he drew in a deep breath. Ok, here goes nothin.'
He slid the manhole cover over to one side, and sprung out of the manhole running fast toward the building. This goes against all my training. He thought as he ran. The way of invisibility was getting blasted to pieces. With a burst of speed, Raphael ran to the building, and leaped right through a window.
"Enough of a diversion for ya, brainiack?" He asked Donatello hotheadedly after he'd landed.
"Good enough for me." Donatello replied. He continued. "Ok, you're going to head for the point of origin too, but it isn't essential that you make it. You've already set off all the alarms. Head toward your right. The point of origin seems to be below you. Take the stairs. You'll be caught too easily in the elevator."
"Duh," Raphael said. He booked it toward the right, entered through the door marked 'stairs,' and headed downwards. He assumed that alarms were going off like crazy, but he couldn't hear anything. Maybe they're the silent kind.
He may not have heard any alarms, but he did hear footsteps and shouting. "Raph," Donatello said in his earpiece, "Ryanne just did another heat scan, and she's picked up on several guards coming your way. They're above you in the stairwell."
"Bring it on," Raphael said, pulling out his Sais. He launched himself into a flip, and landed on the stairs above him, bringing him eye-level to the guards.
They were big. They were ugly. They were going to be so much fun.
Raphael spun his sais, "You boys lookin' for me?"
They growled and grunted as big ugly guards will do, and came lumbering after him with their arms stretched open wide. There were about five of them, and they were all oversized land-masses. Raphael dodged one, and did a spinning kick into another. The other landed into one, which landed into one, which landed into the last one. They all fell down several flights of stairs.
"Nothin' like bowling for guards!"
He heard a big grunt behind him. He turned around to see an angry guard coming after him with his arms stretched out again. Raphael smiled. He lunged, and punched. The guy never saw it coming. And in fact, wouldn't see anyone for a while. He'd been knocked out cold.
"Good work Raph," Donatello exclaimed. "Now just head down the stairwell. The last floor is the basement. Walk in, and turn to your left. There should be a way to get down. In the blueprints it looks like a tunnel, but more likely it's a hidden room. Once you get below basement level, we can't help you with the heat scanners. You'll be on your own."
"Yeah well, if any more of those stupid guards come, I don't think that I'll have a problem." Raphael said confidently.
He booked it down the stairs, skipping multiple steps at once, and finally just leaped from stairwell to stairwell. Once he reached the bottom, he went through the door to the basement. It was full of old junk, big boxes, and some more really ugly, big, and stupid guards. But this time there was a whole heck of a lot more of them.
"Uh, Don," He said through gritted teeth, "Didn't you know that this basement of yours is crawling with guards?"
There was a silence on the other end for a second.
"Don!"
"Ryanne just did another heat scan. Apparently the sensors don't work at basement level either."
The guards moved in on him, trying to box him in.
"Great Don!"
"Sorry,"
"When I get out of this mess, I'm going to find you and…" A guard came towards him. But he seemed to be a little smarter. That is he didn't do as much monosyllabic grunting that the less intelligent guards tended to let out. He also didn't lumber, and was a little more agile on his feet. Raphael tried to dodge him. But this guard was quicker than he'd thought. He took a punch to the left shoulder and flew backwards into a pile of boxes.
He groaned.
"You alright, Raph?" It was Ryanne.
Raphael sat up, and said, "Yeah, peachy." As quick as he could he took off, and hid. It's a good thing I'm a ninja.
Luckily these guards weren't smart enough to have watched where Raphael hid. They looked around in confusion. This gave Raphael a chance to count them up.
"Lets see… twenty over there, six over in that corner, and fourteen in the center," He muttered to himself. "Geeze, that's fourty guards altogether. And I'm the crazy stuntman to sign up for the job of distracting them…"
"Don't worry, Raph." It was Donatello's voice this time. "Leo and Mikey are already inside the building. They're using the ventilation systems. They're on their way down to the basement. But you've got to keep the guards busy so that they don't get caught."
"Ah, I knew you were going to say that."
"Hey, you're starting to sound like me, Raph!" That was Ryanne.
Donatello laughed in his ear.
Raphael would have laughed had he not been trying to hide. He moved around the pile of boxes he was hiding behind. Looking up, he saw that the basement ceiling was covered in pipes. Jumping up to the pipes, he pulled him self above them. There was a six foot gap in between the pipes and the ceiling, probably so that when a pipe needed repairs, the plumber would have ample space to move around in. However, these pipes spread widely apart from each one. He'd have to remember those balancing training sessions with the bamboo sticks, or he'd fall off for sure!
Carefully, and quietly (the way of invisibility also includes the way of silence, after all) Raphael positioned himself over the six guards in the left corner of the room. He frowned for a second, because something about these guards didn't sit right with him. After a moment he realized why. They weren't looking for anyone, like the other guards were doing. They were big, but they didn't look like regular guards. And the fact that they were all standing side-by side in a line wasn't comforting either.
It's like they're trying to hide something. Raphael thought.
Donatello spoke up. "Those guards down there seem to be near the area of the tunnel that leads downward. If you can take them out, or get them away from the area so that Leo and Mikey can get to the signal—"
"Yeah yeah," Raphael said impatiently, "I got it. Take out six guards. No problemo."
Raphael made his way right above the guards, and jumped on top of them. His landing effectively disabled two of the six guards, and equally surprised the rest of them. But it wasn't long until they got their wits back and surrounded him. Raphael's first impression was right. They weren't like regular guards. His big tip off? Oh, maybe the fact that they pulled out some Katanas, and some sharp throwing stars. They were definitely ninjas.
If it weren't for the fact that he'd had loads of practice in dealing with multiple ninjas at one time in his escapades with Shredder's foot ninjas, Raphael would have been in a world of hurt. But that didn't mean that he wasn't in for some serious pain. The ninja guards closed in. Raphael pulled out his sais, and began to—as he would put it—kick some serious shell.
The first ninja was a slice and dice, quite literally. The ninja tried to katana his sais into half their original size, but Raphael caught the blades in between the prongs of his sais, and broke the blades in half. With that, he brought up his fist, and taught the guy what it felt like to fly.
But while he was thus distracted from the other three ninjas, they were able to gang up on him at once, utilizing their katanas, and backing him into a corner. The first swing of the sword Raphael dodged, the second he ducked, and knocked the guy wielding it down to the ground with a well placed roundhouse kick. A star flew toward his head, and Raphael just barely managed to dodge it in time.
"There!" Donatello cried, nearly making Raphael jump out of his shell, a dangerous thing for him because he was working on ducking a dragon punch from a goon on the right.
"What!" He yelped.
"There on your left. It doesn't look like much, but the brick is sticking out a little too far. Press it. I'm sure that's what'll lead down to the point of origin."
"But I still gotta take out these guys." Duck, kick, punch, slash with sai.
"Well hurry up."
That was not something Raphael wanted to hear at the moment. He growled, and knocked aside a flying star, and slashed at the ninja that tossed it. The ninja backed away in a jiffy.
"Uh oh," Donatello said.
"Now what!"
"Don't look now, but you're attracting attention."
"Isn't that the point!" Raphael looked around. Sure enough, the other 34 guards that had been previously been confounded by Raphael's disappearance, were now attracted to the fighting like moths to a flame. Raphael was in some serious trouble now.
But Raphael had a brilliant notion. If he did say so himself.
Time to disappear again.
He leaped back up to the pipes. As expected, the ninja he had been fighting followed him. Leap-frogging (or turtling) between pipes, he made a mad dash toward the other end. This made so much noise that the big ugly guards below him heard, and followed the noise. That's right. Come this way, and leave that secret entranceway unguarded…
He jumped down behind a pile of junk. That put off the ground guards efficiently, but the ninja above weren't too surprised. They leaped down five feet away, and by the look of things, they were not all that happy to be playing cat and mouse.
Raphael had managed to take out four by the secret passageway, but there were still two more to deal with, and their backup of living mountains. He sighed. This was not going to be easy. The two ninja had had their weapons either mutilated or lost from Raphael's excellent skills with his sais, but they did know how to throw a punch. Raphael hit the wall, making a dent in it with his shell. That did not feel good!
He had to get up quickly before a leaping kick put his lights out for a while. Raphael moved to one side, letting the ninja fly by, and giving him a good thwack on the back for his efforts too. Luckily walls didn't like ninja feet flying into them either. The ninja slammed his foot against the wall, and fell down, gripping his ankle. Raphael dealt him a final blow just to make sure he couldn't do anything else. A big ugly guard came tumbling toward him. Raphael kicked him back. But not very far back. Raphael still had a ninja to deal with, but it would be harder to get to him in a sea of ugly big buffoons in his way. Raphael took refuge in the stupidity of the guards.
However, that one guard didn't like being kicked, and came at him again, ready to grab and squash the little mutant out of existence with one hand. Raphael felt very sorry to disappoint him, but a turtle's gotta do what a turtle's gotta do.
Rapid punches in the stomach, followed by several roundhouse kicks to the side did… absolutely nothing! The guard threw a punch, and this time Raphael landed into another guard, who grabbed him.
"Not today pal!" He yelled, and elbowed the guy hard in the sternum. The guard let out grunt, and let Raphael go.
He turned back to the other guard. The guards had made a circle around him and the one. It's not like they believed they had much to worry about. He was a lot smaller than they were, and there were certainly more of them. They'd take him out later. But right now, they wanted to see some entertainment. All they had to do was keep him from escaping.
Raphael and the big guard circled each other, looking for an opening. Raphael was beginning to get frustrated. He yelled, and sprung at his opponent.
Punching and kicking, Raphael grunted. "Do me a favor," double handed jab, kick, spin, "and just be a good little mountain and go down!"
No go. The guy seemed to be made of steel. He landed another punch, catching Raphael in the ribs. Raphael flew back into the ring of other guards. They pushed him back into the center.
Along with the pain, Raphael felt his body begin to tire. Ok, the time was for plan C. He leaped over the heads of the guards, and pretended they were bamboo sticks. He leaped from head to head, and finally found a great big pile of junk to disappear into. Rummaging around, he began looking for a bludgeoning object. Ah perfect! A rusty pipe would work just fine. He picked it up.
"Why don't you just use your sais, Raph?" Ryanne asked.
"I don't wanna kill the guards. Just put them out of commission," came the focused response.
And a well aimed blow to the back of the head did the job quite nicely. In a matter of maybe a minute and a half, all the guards were out cold.
"Not bad Raph," That was Donatello. "Very creative."
Raphael threw down his pipe. "There's still that nin—"
Too late, the ninja dropped down on him—much like Raphael himself had done a few minutes ago—and threw a punch into Raphael's face.
"I'm comin' Raph!" Donatello called.
Raphael kicked the ninja off of him, and rubbed his face. "Ok, punk. You ain't gonna be happy when you wake up in the morning."
Raphael pulled out his sais. Coming in for a blow to the torso with the sharp points, Raphael leaped, and instead of hitting the target, the target reached up, grabbed him, and flung him aside like so much spaghetti. He flew into a pile of cardboard boxes. He sprung to his feet, his anger returning.
"All right, that's it. This party's over!" He threw his well aimed sais, which caught on the ninja's clothing, pinning the guy to the wall.
With a final punch to the face, effectively disabling the ninja, Raphael took back his sais, gave them a fancy twirl, and shoved them back onto his belt. That was about the time that Donatello showed up.
"Nice work! Leo and Mikey are already to the point of origin. Come on!"
Sprinting to the corner where the secret door was, Donatello and Raphael found that a section of the wall had opened up, which lead to a tunnel that had steps leading downward. It was dark, and quite a ways down.
"Great. More running…" Said a disgruntled Raphael.
As they made their way down the stairs, Raphael was just struck with a thought.
"Don, what makes you think that the dude is even going to be down there?"
Donatello looked at him. "I'm actually hoping that he's not going to be down there."
That threw Raphael for a loop. "What?"
Donatello explained. "We've gotta hide before he comes. He'll know the building had been broken into, but I sabotaged all of the cameras as I came down so that he wouldn't know where we went. I'm hoping actually that the police would just think it was a regular burglary, and that the guy won't really be expecting us."
They hit the bottom of the stairs. The tunnel was lit up ahead, with an automatic metal sliding door. They headed toward it.
"So we're gonna just catch the guy? No fighting?" He sounded disappointed.
"If it comes to that, yes. But it would be better just to get the guy taken to prison."
Raphael rolled his eyes. Donatello just didn't understand the word 'revenge' very well.
They reached the door, which opened for them.
"Mikey! Leonardo! We're home!" Donatello called.
"Hey! We thought you'd never get here." That was Michelangelo calling from the right corner of the room. He was behind a control consol, watching a screen that completely took up the entire right wall. The room wasn't huge, but it was a very big screen. So far, the screen was blank.
"What are you looking at, Mikey?" Donatello asked.
"I was just wondering how hard it would be to install one of these babies into the lair." There was an air of pleading in his voice.
"No way Mikey."
"Awww…"
Leonardo hung out on the left side of the room. He held Donatello's scanner in his hand, and stood beside another sliding door. He called over to Donatello. "The point of origin is inside here, but the door is shut, and I don't know how to get it open."
Donatello made his way over to the computer consol, while Raphael leaned against the wall.
Punching buttons, Donatello began to shake his head. "Interesting. Somebody took the control for the doors offline. Why would they…?"
Michelangelo strolled by, and looked at the consol. "Hey, I wonder what this button does!" He reached forward to push a red button on the control panel.
"Don't—" Donatello yelped.
Too late. Michelangelo's fingers had already pressed the button. A blue flashing light caught everyone's attention. The huge television screen had turned on.
Images flashed by, seeming to be at random. A scene of cops pulling guns and firing switched to a little girl being nabbed by some evil crook, followed quickly by a vicious and graphic hacksaw murder.
"These must be Ryanne's precognitive dreams." Donatello commented as the images flashed by on the screen.
Leonardo shuddered. "Bleck! Talk about a nightmare…"
Suddenly, the door to the tunnel slid shut, a hissing sound letting everyone present know that the door was air-locked.
"Aw, geeze." Michelangelo muttered.
"Mikey!" The other three yelled in accusation.
"It wasn't me this time, honestly!"
Donatello turned to the computer consol, and began pressing buttons. "Guys, I can't get the door to open back up."
"I got this one." Raphael called out, springing toward the door as he simultaneously pulled out a sai. He worked an end into the small space between the wall panel, and the metal door. The problem was that the door stuck into the opposite wall so far that Raphael's sais couldn't lever anything.
"Would anyone by any chance happen to have a credit card?" Michelangelo asked, walking up behind Raphael—who grunted strainedly with the effort of trying to find a way to muscle open the door. "Maybe we could key this thing open."
"Get real Mikey!" Raphael exclaimed, not in the mood for dumb comments from his goofball brother.
And, of course, as they normally do for the turtles when they get in a particular jam, things became worse.
The vents in the room began to hiss. A misty green gas poured from the floor and the ceiling.
"What the…?" Leonardo exclaimed.
Donatello, being the closest to a vent, began coughing. "A t-trap!" he spluttered.
"No duh!" Raphael yelled, beginning to panic? "Now what, genius?" He dug his sai in deeper. Still the door remained closed. Then he began to feel the effects of the gas.
Donatello dropped to his knees. All four turtles now coughed and spluttered, unable to breathe proper air.
"Guys!" Ryanne called from the headset Donatello wore. "What's happening? Guys?"
By now, now one could call out. The room spun for them, and they all fell to the ground overcome with dizziness. Leonardo had the presence of mind to pull out a katana, but by then the dizzying effects of the gas excreting from the walls overpowered him, and his katana dropped from his hand, clattering against the ground, the noise seeming to make an eternal echo.
Ryanne's headset dropped to the ground. She had to get them out of there! But how? Jumping out of the Battle Shell, and running towards the building, she thought, the ventilation shaft!
She would follow the nondescript path that Michelangelo and Leonardo themselves had taken, through the building's ventilation systems. As she sprang lightly through the now broken window, Ryanne met a rather disconcerting sight.
The ventilation shaft that the two turtles had taken hung high in the air, the lobby ceiling being at least three stories high. The only way to get to it would be to jump, but Ryanne couldn't jump nearly as high as the turtles could. Suddenly a familiar feeling washed over her as she contemplated the near impossibility of scaling the walls to get to the shaft. The feeling she always got when one of her precognitions were about to become reality. She 'remembered' how she climbs up to the shaft…slowly she let her precognition take over.
Grabbing two long and thin broken shards of metal that had been torn loose from the windows as Raphael broke through them, Ryanne moved to the wall she had to scale. Punching holes into the sheetrock with her new climbing tools, at a downward angle so that she could use her feet for motion as well, Ryanne began to make her way to the top of the wall. Several times her feet would slip—as she wore only old sneakers with worn-down treads that the turtles had scrounged up for her—but each time Ryanne hung on to her "grappling hooks" and continuously rose to the challenge. It was a good thing she'd participated in the turtles' training exercises or she'd never have made it to the first ten feet, much less the whole three stories.
Once she reached the ventilation shaft, and crawled inside it, Ryanne stared down the long dark tunnel.
"Ah…this would be so much easier of I didn't have to do this by myself!" She whined.
However, she knew as well as anybody that whining did absolutely nothing. She made her way forward. Luckily, it didn't feel too cramped, seeing as how two bulky turtles made it through without any issues.
Having no idea where to go, but assuming that heading downward would work, Ryanne began forward. She called on her gift, asking her precognition which way to go whenever she came to an intersection of shafts. She let her sense of 'familiarity' lead her. Unfortunately her precognition never acted as a warning signal, thus Ryanne shrieked in surprise when the tunnel became a sudden drop.
Forcing back the panic that tried to spew out of the closet she'd put it in, Ryanne fell a good twenty feet before she gathered the wits to jam her feet into the sides of the shaft, breaking her fall.
"Whew!" she sighed in relief.
The rest of the way became a piece of cake. She slipped once more, and fell for a long way, then she jammed her feet in again. And slipped. It certainly was not her day!
She finally put some extra steam into her 'breaking system' and was able to stop herself ten feet before she hit the bottom of the shaft for the vent. That was when she put both feet on one side of the shaft, and began to "walk" down very slowly. Her rear hit the bottom of the shaft. Crawling towards the light (the only way to go anyway, as the shaft made an L, the only two directions being up, and to the left) Ryanne found herself at the end of the shaft-tunnel.
As she looked out of the grille in front of the opening, Ryanne guessed she was ceiling height once more. And judging by the pipes, she had made it to the basement. She hoped to high heaven that the guards Raphael had taken out were still unconscious or gone.
Carefully, she lifted the grille open. She looked downwards first. Debris, and cardboard boxes, piles of junk, and huge mounds of guards littered the basement floor. Luckily for her, these guys were still unconscious.
Ryanne found a nearby pipe and jumped for it, managing to grab onto it. She hung there for a second or so, judging the distance between herself and the floor. Then she let herself drop. A lucky guard found himself to be the padding between Ryanne and the cement floor, after she had fallen from fifteen to twenty feet. With a satisfied smirk, Ryanne pulled herself to her feet, and dashed toward the corner she'd seen on the camera screen. The hidden door, still ajar like a gaping mouth, beckoned her forward.
Ryanne dashed down the dark stairwell, and into the tunnel. She spotted the closed metal door instantly. However, she completely missed the man behind her holding a syringe filled with a clear liquid.
He calmly put a restrictive arm around her chest, and stuck the needle into her own arm, while saying "Welcome home, my child. I've been waiting for you."
Without so much as a whimper, Ryanne fell to the floor.