A/N: I really don't know why this update took so long o.0! Anyway, I'm sorry for making you wait. I hope this chapter was worth it.

Chapter Five: Findings.

Donatello's entire body jolted awake. He didn't pass through the two different worlds peacefully, like some sort of sedated form of meditation. It was fast. Jarring. His body was brimming with adrenaline while his mind desperately scrambled to catch up. Disorientated, Don swung at the first thing he saw. It was fortunate that he missed, otherwise he would have really upset his family.

"Donny! Calm down!" A frantic voice instructed. It sounded like Leonardo. Blinking furiously, wanting his eyes to adjust faster, Don gasped when a strong set of hands pushed him back down onto his mattress. "Calm down!" Leo repeated.

Donatello struggled and bucked for a few seconds until his brother's words finally made it through to him. Seeing him relax, Leonardo cautiously removed his grip and took a step backwards. Breathing hard, Don looked around his room, noticing Splinter, Raphael and Michelangelo standing warily around his bedside. "Did you have that bad dream again?" Mike timidly inquired.

"…Yeah," Don admitted. He didn't say anything else about it. The turtle himself was still pondering what had happened. Was he really frightened of that other world? Looking within himself, Don ashamedly knew that he was getting used to that mental institution. That's why he found his situation so confusing. Seeing the Shredder pose as his so-called 'father' terrified Donatello. Yet, as always, the possibility sparked endless amounts of curiosity. He didn't know what to say to his turtle family. Some underlying need kept pulling him back to that humanised world – he wasn't ready to deny its entire existence. Not just yet.

"You've been unconscious for about three hours," Leo informed him. "We were getting worried," the blue-wearing turtle softly added.

"What happened?" Don inquired.

"You blacked out while I was speaking with you," Splinter said. Donatello remained quiet. He hated the fact that his family worried about him so much. What he loathed even more was how he doubted whether they were even real. Donatello knew that only one world was the correct one; that someone was toying with him… or he was just fooling himself. Either way he felt like a traitor.

A loud knock resonated around Donatello's concrete-walled bedroom. Compared with the abundant amount of silence, the noise rattled the turtles' senses, causing their bodies to jerk in alarm. It was Raphael who responded the quickest; opening the door to invite their large friend inside. "Donatello! It's good to see that you're awake," Leatherhead said, sounded relieved. The alligator stared at everyone else in the room. "I hope I didn't interrupt anything," Leatherhead worried.

"No, not at all," Splinter answered, encouraging the large reptile to continue.

"I thought you'd all like to know that April and I have cracked the disks," Leatherhead announced.

"Really?" Don was shocked, though a part of him felt guilty that he hadn't been well enough to help.

"What's on them?" Raphael questioned, just as impatient as everybody else in the room.

"I've only skimmed through some of the files, but so far we haven't found any information about what the Shredder's doing with all the alien technology he's been gathering," Leatherhead sadly reported.

"So we went through all that for nothing then?" Leonardo rhetorically asked, sounding rather disappointed.

"Well, no. Not exactly," the alligator said. The turtles stared at him intently, all wondering the same question. "There wasn't any information about the alien technology, but the disks do detail the Shredder's other projects."

"Like what?" Mike asked, feeling like he was being baited to ask for more.

"Information about his biological experiments. How he cloned and improved upon himself; his plans on mutating others into monsters. There's a lot of in-depth information on his smaller projects. One of them sounds similar to what Donatello seems to be experiencing," Leatherhead solemnly announced.

"What has Chaplin done to me?" Don dared to ask.

"Unfortunately the project is still in its experimental phase, so there wasn't that much on it. However what I did learn was that they are using a series of hallucinogens in order to recruit, or rather, involuntarily convert new members. The goal is to increase the number of people in their arsenal."

"So that's what Dr Chaplin meant… That injection really was a preparation fluid," Donatello whispered, speaking more to himself than to anybody else.

"But how does it work? What happens in these hallucinations?" Leonardo questioned.

"It didn't say. I'm not sure if this is what's happening to Donatello, but it was the closest report that I could find that's reasonably similar to his situation," the alligator answered honestly.

"Is there a cure?" Splinter calmly inquired.

"There is. It's a mixture that you can take which will supposedly end the hallucinations."

"But you're not sure if Don's suffering from this, right?" Raphael skeptically asked.

"That's right. But from looking at the components of the antidote, I recommend that he should be administered with it anyway. It shouldn't harm him, even if he isn't a part of this recruiting project," Leatherhead suggested.

"So, if those disks detail the ingredients needed, then can we make the cure here?" Leonardo wondered, swiftly coming up with the simplest solution.

"You could… but it would be difficult. Some of the rarer base elements are needed."

"So we steal it from one of the Shredder's labs." Leonardo didn't ask a question, but rather he made a determined decision.

"Guess we've got some more Chaplin ass kicking coming up!" Raphael sadistically grinned at the idea.

Splinter gave Raphael a disapproving frown at his student's choice of words. "Before we kick anyone's… posterior, I suggest that we all get some rest. We can continue this discussion later on tonight," Splinter advised the turtles, carefully picking his words.

"Yes, Master Splinter," all four turtles quietly responded in unison. Without saying another word, Don watched from his bed as his brothers, Splinter and Leatherhead quietly left his room, one by one.


It plagued his mind. He had to see it for himself. Donatello hurriedly scrolled through the disks, hoping to find what Leatherhead had been talking about. The turtle had been searching for about thirty minutes, just scanning his eyes across the massive piles of information. In front of him lay one report after another. At first he was mortified with what he read, learning that the Shredder truly was barbaric. However the longer he searched, the more he grew used to the horrors that lay within the text.

His finger suddenly lifted off the mouse, causing his constant page-scrolling to cease. Something had finally caught his eye. Leatherhead was correct – there wasn't that much information on the experiment at all. In total, there seemed to be only two paragraphs. The first one focused on the hallucinogen and what its purpose was. The second paragraph detailed the components of the antidote. In the end, Donatello felt unsatisfied; Leatherhead had practically summarised all of it, meaning that there was no way to know for certain whether this was what Dr Chaplin had used.

Donatello was startled when Leonardo suddenly entered the vast open space of the lair. The two turtles stared at each other for a few moments. "What are you doing?" Leo inquired.

"I'm just going through these disks," Don casually answered, focusing his gaze once more on the computer screen.

"You should be getting some more rest," Leo advised him.

"I'm sick of sleeping. That's all I've been doing lately," Donatello grumped. Leonardo didn't argue, causing Don to figure that the blue-wearing turtle seemed to understand his predicament. "Besides, shouldn't you be in bed?" Don asked. It was only midday. However, to crime-fighting ninja turtles, day was night for them. Don had always wondered if they were naturally diurnal or nocturnal. Yet since they couldn't move about in the daytime, instead being forced to travel, scavenge and fight during the night, it seemed only fitting to sleep from sunrise to sunset. Of course, it was still rather hard to tell while living in the sewers. But all that changed when one day, years ago, Donatello introduced the wonderful invention of a clock to the rest of his family.

"I thought I might get in a few hours of training before everyone else wakes up," Leo answered. Not having much else to say to each other, both turtles went back to their separate tasks. Starting off with a couple of warm-up exercises, Leonardo quickly progressed to practicing a couple of punches and the movements involved with wrist locks. It wasn't long till Donatello grew distracted; then again the turtle was getting too tired to continue reading the seemingly endless pages of gruesome documents anyway. It took even less time for Don's mind to wander off completely, inevitably thinking about that other world.

Quietly pondering everything he had heard over the past couple of hours, a disturbing question started to plague the purple-wearing turtle. Was it all just too convenient? Here he was, experiencing bizarre and unexplainable illusions, comas and random black outs. Yet as soon as things started to make some sense in Don's mind, Leatherhead just casually summarised his condition before pointing out an antidote for all his problems. Is it too convenient for there to be a cure? Donatello had an inkling that he wasn't the only one in his family that felt that his dreams were far too complex to simply be hallucinations. Don assumed that if he did get injected because he was simply being recruited, then other victims would encounter similar fantasies. But was it even scientifically possible to invent a fluid that would cause such planned dreams and responses? Donatello never doubted the genius of Stockman and Chaplin, yet the turtle did have to question whether the whole injection theory was just a flimsy excuse his brain made up so that he could stay in his fantasy world. In an instant, being an insane human really seemed to be more plausible.

Donatello suddenly remembered what April had told him about finding a trigger. If what those doctors had been saying was true, then there was a fault, or rather an unanswerable question within his fantasy. Yet finding one was easier said than done. It was true that life naturally held some mysteries. Like how does something as simple as a bunch of neural impulses, nerves and chemicals form a brain – a complex organ capable of withholding a personality and a state of awareness? Or, for instance, what happened right at the very beginning of the Big Bang? Or why is it rare to see a baby pigeon when the species is so abundant? It was easy to find a question with no answer, however most of them would be too broad and general. Donatello had a much harder job – he had to find an unanswerable question that clearly determined what reality was real, and what one was false.

Don knew that it would be practically impossible to find this 'trigger', but he also needed to ease his own mind. All he wanted was to discover some sliver of doubt about his life as a turtle. So he began to think carefully, starting with his brothers.

Immediately he had trouble. How could he think badly about his brothers? Sure, they all had their own little faults and strengths, but nothing really came to Donatello's mind. So he began to concentrate more on their actual mutation. There was a single thing that had always baffled Donatello. 'Why on earth did that boy purchase not one, not two, but four turtle hatchlings?' Don thought to himself. Later the purple-wearing reptile figured that the child wanted to set up a breeding program, and therefore bought as many turtles as possible. Since it was so hard to tell the different between genders, the boy might have just purchased as many as he could get his hands on, in the hopes that he would get at least one male and female pair. 'Then again… maybe he just liked male turtles?' Don sarcastically pondered. Once again, Donatello started to experience that odd feeling like everything seemed too planed; as though it was all just too much of a coincidence. Falling down the drain; all coming into contact with the ooze; getting found by Splinter; who in turn was indirectly related, through six degrees of separation, to the creatures who had created the glowing substance and their mutant existence in the first place. It truly was a remarkable and fanciful story. Yet Don couldn't deny his family, ninjitsu lifestyle and friends just because everything bordered on being incredibly coincidental.

Soon Donatello's thoughts wandered to Master Splinter. All of the turtles had always pondered over one detail in their teacher's life. If Splinter was originally just a normal pet rat, then how was he able to memorise Hamato Yoshi's ninjitsu moves? None of his brothers could come up with an answer, and no one wanted to ask their father personally. Somehow Donatello always figured that Splinter didn't know either. It wasn't until they had learnt about Yoshi's full involvement with the Utroms when a plausible answer could be proposed. Ironically it was Donatello who came up with a hypothesis to end the puzzle his brothers had been trying to solve over the years. Since Yoshi spent some time with the Utroms, the turtles thought that maybe he brought home trace elements of the ooze, which then transferred over to Splinter whenever he was fed, cleaned or played with. As far fetched as it was, Don and his brothers unanimously agreed that that was how Splinter had originally learned ninjitsu. While Don still found his father's story a little hard to believe, he still couldn't bring himself to deny his Master's entire existence.

Donatello was starting to feel rather defeated. Maybe he was wrong and that the mental institution was all just some wild hallucination? After all, he still didn't enjoy the fact that the Shredder was his blood-related father. Then again, if the people in that other version of reality didn't necessary act the same way as they did in normally, then what was Oroku Saki really like? Why did he hate his human father so much? Oddly enough, Donatello started to feel remorse for the man. If his son really was in a mental institution, locked in some fantasy where he loathed his father and battled with him daily, then how would he feel? He must be a caring person if he's willing to continue helping and visiting his lost son. Who was this Oroku Saki?

That name had always sent shivers right around Donatello's shell. Don knew the 'man' to be a fearsome adversary. He was strong, smart and well equipped. It seemed that the Shredder even knew how to cheat death. Don's thoughts abruptly stopped for a few seconds. Why didn't the Shredder ever die? He had been crushed and thrown off a building, decapitated, burnt, sunk… and had even been caught in an implosion. Naturally Don figured that Shredder had survived so many times because he was wearing that sturdy human 'exoskeleton' suit. Yet, he still shouldn't have been able to survive Zog's attack on the Foot's ship and the implosion of TCRI. Donatello remembered one of the times Oroku Saki had 'died'. There was only one or two seconds left when the turtles had escaped the doomed TCRI building via the Transmat. The Shredder had no protection – he was crawling around in his Utrom form. After the implosion there was nothing left of the TCRI building… and yet their Machiavellian enemy survived. How did he escape with such little time? April and Casey had told them that no one else had used the Transmat after them. The Shredder couldn't travel fast with his stubby tentacles – he was too far away from any electronic device that could prove useful in saving his life. Yet he still managed to live on… Why?

Donatello's whole body froze in terror. He had found his trigger. The only answer he could come up with was that the Shredder kept on living because he wanted him to… He wanted someone to fight. He wanted to hate his father over and over again. There was no other logical explanation. Sure, the Shredder may have found some other way to escape during the very last millisecond, but how far should Donatello suspend his disbelief? Trying his best to remain calm, Donatello closed his eyes and thought through everything once again. Which reality was the nightmare, and what one was just the normal brutality of life? Donatello could no longer tell… All he knew was that he preferred to be human…

Leonardo stopped his training in order to view Donatello at his computer. The turtle gasped when Don slumped forward, resting his head against the monitor while his plastron pressed down on the keyboard. Leonardo frantically ran towards his brother, fearing the worst. "Donatello!" he screamed in panic.

"Donny?"

"Danny?"

Donatello blinked. April was in front of him, checking his vitals. He knew in an instant that he was human again. "You there?" April asked, wondering if her patient was actually conscious.

"Yeah… I'm awake," Donatello groggily answered. He sighed tiredly while April continued to note down some observations. "I want to speak with Dr Stockman," Donatello finally said. The woman stared at the bedraggled man for a few moments before obliging.

"I'll arrange a meeting immediately."

To be continued…