CHAPTER THREE
"Tell me how your day went, you can start from the beginning if you like" Irma spoke as she offered a dazed and confused Michelangelo a soothing hot mug of tea.
"My head doesn't feel too gnarly Irma" Michelangelo responded, trying to pinpoint his exact location. He felt he had been ripped away from something...an important place to be, he felt like he was late for an appointment.
"That's why you're here" came another voice, this time belonging to Raphael.
"Yeah, I guess" Michelangelo continued.
His whereabouts became more clear to him. He'd started off lying down on a scarlet red couch in the midst of a field of white, but now it was solidifying into the living quarters of the Turtle's sewer lair.
He was surrounded by familiar faces, of friends and family, but something felt off about them.
"So how was it? The day?" Donatello insisted.
"We took down a rhino" Michelangelo began
"Animal cruelty" Raphael replied.
"Hey, they were threatning people on the street" Michelangelo continued, "You were there, you know"
"And how did you deal with him?" Raphael asked.
"Old family secret" Michelangelo responded
"You can share it" Irma replied.
"Don't need to do I?" said Michelangelo.
The group huddled closer together, encircling the Turtle, their faces were a little more sollemn, less kinder.
Michelangelo sighed, and took out his nun-chucks.
"Just as I thought...can't share the family secrets, 'cause you guys ain't family, you'd know exactly what I was talking about"
"He's using weapons" said Raphael.
"That is most unwise" uttered Master Splinter as he too entered the room with Leonardo at his side.
"Why? The real rad rat of our pack taught us how to fight with these" replied Michelangelo as he twirled the nun-chucks in his hand, ready to make a move at the slightest provocative motion from those surrounding him.
"This is not how it all began" the group said in unison, their bodies turning to transparent glass.
"You want me to spill how it all came to be? You seem to have a clear image of that, you looking for something else?" said Michelangelo.
"Where did you go next?" demanded Donatello.
"You still want to ask questions?" Michelangelo asked
"Home" Leonardo joined in
"While all the chaos was unfolding in the city?" Splinter responded.
"It was totally happening down where we crash too" Michelangelo replied
"The fight?" said Leonardo.
Michelangelo headed towards the kitchen to microwave some pizza. If this was to be an interogation, he would engage it on a weak stomach.
He sat down at the table and gazed with mouth-watering relish at the concoction, a meatball pizza plata with added chicken strips. He was in seventh heaven.
The aroma generated by the pizza was enticing, and it lured even those posing as Michelangelo's loved ones to march forth, mesmerized by the smell
"What does it smell like?" said Irma.
"You don't know?" Michelangelo asked, then realized what these people were made of.
"Ah right, you don't have real organs, so you can't smell. Bet you can't taste either, all the more for me" he replied gleefully, but then his mind turned to other matters as he realized someone was missing from this ensemble.
"Hey, where's April?" he asked
"Help me to understand, I can't handle this" Irma uttered.
"That's what she said" Michelangelo cracked.
"Who?" asked Irma.
"My secret"
"Your secret is a woman?" Splinter replied.
"It always starts with a woman" Michelanglo replied.
With those words uttered, Michelangelo found himself back on the backstreets of New York, next to the dismembered Taxi cab, he find the Turtles, the real Turtles, thrusting their kicks deep into their warthog adversaries gut. Like with the rhinoceros before him, he gradually turned red and finally faded from sight completely.
"Reality's edited him out just like it did his buddy, we need to find a way of tracing where they disappear to" Leonardo replied.
"Mikey, did you do as I instructed when you blanked out?" asked Donatello.
"I thought, and fought, long and hard...at least I feel like I did...but I think I touched on something, a feeling from the old reality"
"What feeling?" asked Donatello
"Love dude" said Michelangelo.
"Oh for pete's sake, that's 'how it all began'...with love? What is this? Daytime Hallmark?" said Raphael, groaning.
"We'll focus on what this means later, right now we've got to head underground and replenish our energies" Leonardo replied, heading towards a nearby manhole cover. He lifted the lid and descended down the ladder. The remainder of the Turtles followed him
"Who turned the lights out?" joked Donatello, the last to join, as he entered the pitch black sewers.
Krang took a look beyond the peak of the mountain, put his googles on, and breathed deeply.
He could see the wisps of clear cold air dance around the mountain top like graceful silk. He could hear the humming of several birds in flight, and he could feel the artificial nerves of his robot body give him a tingle as he pressed his knees down on the skies and prepared to venture off of the slope
"Release" uttered a voice from behind him.
Krang obliged. He did not look back.
Down the mountain he came, the wind slamming into him like a brick, the adrenaline provoking a yell from the brain that was held tight to the chest by a long velvet scarf. Krang could still through his body's upper eyelids, but his true body could only experience the buffeting.
As he came to the end of his slope, he instructed his body to make a ferocious left turn, causing hefty pillars of snow to spill over and hit people in the stands watching them.
They would not protest, 'least they suffer for it at the hands of the Rock Soldiers holding them at gunpoint. They were there to spectate, take the abuse, and cheerlead to the best of their ability.
Shreeka soon joined Krang, completing her own treacherous trek down the slope, and likewise swarming the spectators with snow after a malicious left turn catapulted the snow their way.
"Trying to one up me after I conquered the fabled Sphere?" said Krang, pointing to the mountain the pair had skied down.
"They say it takes a legend to conquer a myth" remarked Shreeka.
"You're only a legend in your own lunchtime" Krang joked, approaching Shreeka and giving her a tickle.
"Is that your way of telling me to make you a sandwich?" said Shreeka, taking the scarf off of Krang's chest and playing with it.
One of the spectators, a little girl with lush brown hair and pink mittens, broke away from the stands and approached Krang.
"Excuse me sir, could you give me an autograph?" asked the girl, holding a pen and notepad to Krang.
"Scram kid" Krang yelled.
"It won't take much time sir, please, time is precious to us" said the kid.
"Oh give her a thrill Krang" said Shreeka, elbowing Krang and demanding he show some manners.
"Fine, who do I make it out to?" Krang said.
"My name is unimportant, yours is" the girl replied.
Krang was slightly confused.
"You want me to make it out to myself?" he said.
"This is your world, you should always print your name on the label" said the girl.
"Child, where are your parents?" Shreeka asked.
"I am only me" the child replied.
Shreeka pondered the riddle, and then came to a swift conclusion
"If I had to hazzard a guess, you're a part of the Macguffin Krang used to warp reality to what it is now"
The child nodded.
"The device we used has a sentitent element?" Krang said.
"Of course, reality can only be built the way it is by having an intimate understanding of what people care for, how they react, how they think, only a living mind can accomplish that" Shreeka explained.
"So what would you need with me signing myself an autograph?" Krang replied.
"It's a promise you must make, you must swear to yourself that you won't let your creation fall apart, it already is. Promise yourself this is'nt all for nothing, that it can last"
Krang looked again at the notepad, he started combing over it, finding statistics, charts, and decreasing percentages.
"This is a crash report" he realized.
"She's like anti-virus software, it's up to you to install the means of countering what is wrong with the program, with our current state of reality" Shreeka realized.
"There's only one aggressive element that could unravel what we have...or rather four aggresive elements" Krang noted, recognizing the stain of the Turtles anywhere.
"The half-baked heroes must be somehow realizing nothing is as it should be, I'd love to pry their shells right off their backs to ensure they get off ours" an enraged Shreeka threatened.
"We must contact Shredder, let him know that his petty games are beginning to ignite the spark of remembrance...if he's not careful, we could lose our grip on this universe"
"Reality is what we have made it, and we will not rest until it is all we will ever make" Shreeka vowed.
Krang looked upon the girl and gave her an instruction.
"Go, you have my promise, what do you need? Ask anything and you shall receive it, so long as it helps to solve our mutual problem"
"I need understanding...they told me how it all began...with love. I ask of this of you...how does love begin...how does it end?"
Krang and Shreeka looked at one another with puzzled expressions.
"Why are you asking us this?" he said.
The little girl beamed.
"Isn't it obvious?"