Chapter Two
It wasn't peachy when he met up with his brothers, but Mikey was smiling as no one spoke all the way to the lair. Masters of the Shadows, that's what the four of them were. He only liked to believe that he was the best.
"What do you mean Mikey was seen?" Donnie asked when they got back to the lair.
"The Foot has been spotted all over Manhattan," Leo said as he looked over at Mikey.
Mikey, though not really understanding why his brothers were looking at him like that, shrugged.
"Well, at least she didn't faint."
"She could tell someone!" Leo raised his voice.
"Relax, even this dufus knows that no one is going to believe some little girl about seeing a giant turtle."
"What would The Foot want with one girl?" Donnie asked.
"I probably would have asked her, but you guys have to check up on me all the time." Mikey then sat down at the nearby couch.
The three of them looked at Mikey.
"What? At least she didn't scream. She was kinda cute, you know. Reddish brown hair, emerald eyes. She was, you know, cute. Plus, plus, she was in trouble."
"The odds of a human female not screaming at us is astronomical, even the fainting ones count. It is a ninety-eight percent chance that everyone will eventually scream and run away." Donatello said.
Mikey rolled his eyes because he did not really care about what his brother was saying. He found one girl that didn't scream at him.
"Well, she didn't faint. She looked scared, duh."
"Mikey, you know what Master Splinter has always said. The world up there isn't all be accepting of what we are." Leo said.
"I know, I know, Leo. But you didn't see her, you didn't see, ah you weren't there. How can I explain it if you weren't there?"
"Maybe we should find out why The Foot was after her," Donnie said.
Mikey knew that now they were going to talk about why the Foot would be after the girl but he was preoccupied with her looks.
She was cute, a round face with big eyes and long reddish-brown hair. Though her wardrobe could use some work. It looked like she scavenged for her shirt in a dumpster somewhere. But that was what Mikey and his brothers did from an early age, scavenging scraps of clothes from tiny tots to teenagers.
While Leo and Donnie talked about possibilities as to why the Foot was going after this girl, Raph took a more direct approach. He stared at his younger brother.
Mikey looked up at him. "What?" He asked.
"Where's your other nunchuck?" Raph asked.
Usually tucked into a strap of leather around his waist, Mikey looked down. There was one, but there wasn't the other.
"Man, I must have dropped it." He said rubbing his head.
"Mikey," Raph rubbed his hand down his own face. "Look, if you're going to be a crime fighter, you have to be professional. One of these days, we aren't going to be there to get your shell out of trouble."
"Yeah, whatever. I'll just get Donnie to make me a new pair. Or Leo." He popped up out of his seat. "I'm hungry. Is there any more of that pizza left?"
He heard Raph growl from behind him as he headed to the kitchen area to look for more pizza.
2, 4, 7, 9
Running her thumb over the roughened wood of the nunchucks, Jennie pressed the numbers on the keypad next to a hidden door.
The Mikey, as she heard from the imprints in his weapon, she knew was a turtle now. She saw faces of three other things, loud voices, and then she had to rewind farther to figure out how he got in and out of the sewers.
The door hissed open and she looked inside. The place was big, big and open. It smelled musty but that was why the water was coming in from the sewer mains. It was one of those water purifying places that had been decommissioned but was now up and running again. Water flowed into it but there was a rat, a Sensei, who was meditating in a ring of candles on a grate somewhere in the middle.
Sensei, Master Splinter. She kept rubbing the worn wood as she looked around. The weapon had been resting in a room off to the left of the entrance from where she had walked in. Room, home, comics: these were things that Mikey liked.
The rat stood up. "May I help you, child?" He asked.
She looked at him but she looked away slightly because she was more interested in looking at his tail that came out of his robes and wrapped halfway around his legs, much as Shawnee did when she was sitting.
Rat, it was a giant rat. Not that she cared, she was living with a part bird woman and a feline girl that could rip a man's face off.
Shaking her head, she had to focus, Terra was always telling her to focus.
"Where is Mikey?" Jennie asked, knowing that her voice was light, but knew rats had sensitive hearing.
"Who the hell are you?" One of the turtles demanded after he had jumped from somewhere up high.
He was not Mikey, because Mikey was less gruff, plus Mikey was bubbly and talked nice at least for a rejected surfer guy. This one growled, more animal than human. Of course like Mikey, this one was a turtle.
"Raphael," the rat said.
She looked at the floor, crossing her arms and closing her eyes. She tried to read this turtle but she couldn't, it was a blank. Not like when she could read the minds of the Ninjas.
Focus, breathe, Terra would tell her.
Focus, breathe, focus and breathe.
The figure was big, bigger than what Mikey was and even Mikey was big. Over his face and part of his head, he wore a red mask. Mikey was orange, a little bit torn at the ends. This one had brown eyes. Mikey's were blue.
"Hey there, sweet cheeks, have you been following me?" She heard Mikey say.
Jennie looked at him. Focus and breathe; so Jennie focused on his necklaces, they looked like cowrie shells. He was shoved back by the bigger turtle.
"Did you tell her where to find us?" The big one asked.
"No, I didn't say anything. Well, nothing that I wouldn't have said." Mikey looked at him.
Another one, tall and slim came into view. He was a little bit taller than the bigger red-clad turtle. This one wore purple, but he had gizmos and gadgets hanging off of him, one looked like a mechanical backpack. The next one was taller than Mikey but shorter than the red and the purple-clad turtles. His swords caught her attention, only because Terra would have liked them.
They kept looking at her.
"Who are you?" Blue-clad turtle asked.
"Jennie Bourne." She said.
"Why are you here?" Red asked.
She held up the weapon. It was partially wrapped in orange tape. "You dropped this, Mikey."
He faltered. "Wait, I didn't tell you my name."
"Raph," she glanced the Red one. "Leo," then at the blue one. "Donnie." Then she gestured off towards the rat. "Master Splinter."
"She knows our names. She's with Shredders goons." Raph took a step towards her. He was stopped by Leo who put a hand on his brother's chest.
"I need to sit down." Jennie turned and looked around. "I won't be a threat if I sit own."
A chair slid out from the side of the area, scraping across the floor towards her open hand. It only stopped when the back of the metal chair rested in her hand. Jennie sat down. If she looked even smaller, then maybe Raph wouldn't hurt her.
"So cool. You're superhuman. Can you fly?" Mikey asked, almost jumping up and down from where he was standing.
"I don't know." She said. "I don't think so. I move things with my mind. Psychometry is what brought me here."
"What kind of superpower is that?"
"Psychometry is a pseudoscience stating that all things leave imprints of someone who touched an object and can be read by someone else. It has never been proven." Donnie said.
She looked at the ceiling, watched the running water falling down at the center of the living area. It may have smelled but it felt good.
"I saw Sacks." She said as she wrapped both hands around Mikey's weapon. "Shredder, him, yes that one. He was the boss."
She started rocking. She rocked where she stood. Breathing and focusing were hard to do when she knew they were fearful of humans. The images, the flashes from the weapon told her one story of what happened not all that long ago to him and the others.
"They tried to make more of it. That green stuff. Then the purple stuff."
"The mutagens?" Donnie asked.
She shrugged. "When Sacks was arrested, his people took us away to Stockman. It was far away. Us all of us."
"I don't understand. Who is us?" Leo asked.
"The others, like me but they aren't like me. Only four of us got out, there are others but I can't find them."
"There's more of you?" Donnie asked.
She looked at Mikey. She looked down and held out the weapon. "Are you asking about the ones that escaped with me or the ones that haven't escaped?"
"The ones who escaped."
"Then yes, three others. Terra, Shawnee, and Gina."
"Girls?" Donnie asked. His voice seemed to strain but Jennie didn't know why.
"I was the first. I was the discarded one." Jennie said.
"Oh, brother." Raph turned away.
Mikey took his nunchuck back but he squatted down to her level. "Hi, Jennie."
She looked at him. He had blue eyes, just as she thought he had. But he held a really big hand out to her. It was big with a thumb and two fingers.
She looked for an escape but he was right in front of her.
"I can't read you." She said. "I hear thoughts, the voices of people's thoughts. But I can't hear yours."
"Telepathy too? That is like dope powers. You can move things with your mind and read people's minds!" He said loudly. "I am staring at a true superhuman."
"But you're not people." She said. "You're a turtle. You're not a human. You're animal. I can't read animal thoughts. I can even speak to Terra and Gina in their minds."
Leo approached. "You said you were discarded. What do you mean by that?"
"No one wants a retard." She looked away from him.
"What's that, another superpower?" Mikey asked.
"Stupid, dumb, can't do anything right. Retard." She rattled off, remembering memories of a life before all of this.
"Retard means suppressed, like fire retardant," Donnie said. "It doesn't mean any of what you said, Jennie."
"My parents did. They called me retarded. The doctors called me retarded. They said that I won't live to be normal. Put her in a home, we don't care." She said in a deep voice, mimicking her father and what he said. "They left me when I started hearing the voices. The people gave me medicine to stop the voices."
"Wait, because you were different, your parents put you in a facility?" Donnie asked.
She nodded.
"And they were giving her drugs just to make her compliant," Leo said.
Jennie offered a shrug but she glanced at Mikey. He had moved to the side of her as if he was inspecting her like all the doctors and scientists had done before.
"How did you end up with Sacks?" Leo asked.
She saw Raph return from wherever he had gone. "She claimed to be family. The woman called herself Aunt Karai."
"Oh shit," cursed Raphael from off in the distance.
"Go on," Leo said in a more hard tone.
"They took me to a lab, I was the first. They wanted others like me, no family. No hope. I hated the needles but they kept me on my meds, only to take me off when they wanted me to do something."
"My sons," their Sensei said as he approached. "She is in need of help."
Focus, breathe, focus and breathe.
"I can't find my three friends. Can you help me?" She asked looking at the turtles, each in turn. "Can you help me find them?"
Hope you liked it. More to come soon.