RIGHT MINDFULNESS

Eight days I'd spent back in the lair, and for five of them I'd turned my phone off completely. Who knows whether Karai actually believed I couldn't get reception in the sewers or not. Truthfully, spending that much time alone was a bit of a trip, but I can't say I didn't enjoy it. When I worked with her, she ordered all the equipment and bought all the software she'd decided I'd use in our work. Back home, I was welding my experimentation chambers out of oil drums, and writing my programs from scratch, back on my own Linux. I know my brothers always thought my interests confined me in my lab for hours every day, but over those eight days, I realized nothing had felt more liberating.

That eighth day, Karai's team was supposed to return from harvesting the "immortal stone" sample from Labrador. All my work I'd planned to devote myself to after I defected from her experiment would be for nothing unless I happened to catch a ride to the Arctic in the near future. That meant, as much as I dreaded turning my phone back on, I had to put up with the Foot for at least a little while longer if I wanted to obtain those bacteria.

By this point, I had even considered ways to mass-produce the bacterial microcosms, but never put thought into how I'd get the rest of the planet aware of such a device. It's not like the sewer is a prime place for advertising. I supposed I could get April to market the invention aboveground, but I hadn't spoken with her since God knows when. Definitely not since before I moved out, and I hadn't really spent time with her since she started getting really involved with Casey. She's always been a great colleague, but science and jealousy mix like oil and water. I'd given up any kind of romantic feelings for her years before, but old scars still hurt sometimes.

After a few hours, the dreaded call from Karai finally came.

"Buonasera, you have reached the office of Doctor Donato di Betto Bardi." I milked the cheesy accent for all it was worth.

"Donatello." Her bark cut through my attempt at humor. "The team has just arrived."

"You have the samples?"

"Yes. And I must say, I am unsure about how reliable your search for what qualifies as a sample is. They have brought me twenty gallons of pond scum. Do you know how much this whole project has cost me?"

"That's exactly what I told the technicians to bring back, Karai." I paused to remember the explanation I'd given her before. "The original sample is a perfect match with a certain ancient layer of rock in old geologic shields around the world. Rather than ask you to pay millions to drill deep through the surface, I figured we'd take the cost-effective route. The reservoir in Labrador eroded all the way through the crust to that layer, and the dissolved rock is actively absorbed by cold-favoring bacteria that thrive in marshy environments."

"I see." She bought it. "Well, knowing you aren't opposed to late shifts, and seeing as you've been out of my lab for more than a week, I'm asking you to come in tonight at nine."

"No assistants or anything?"

"Unfortunately, our underlings work more regular hours than you do. In light of what happened to our three other labs, I'm asking you specifically because I need someone who can both make progress on our research and keep the lab secure."

"I didn't recall working as a security guard being on my contract."

"I'd hoped you'd understand, Donatello. This is our last active laboratory in Manhattan. Should anything happen tonight, I'd have to relocate you and everyone else on the staff to Japan until we can renovate another property."

"That doesn't really do anything to persuade me, you know." I chuckled.

"All I'm asking you to do is catch up on your work and keep an eye on the security cameras. Should anyone appear, neutralizing them is as simple as touching a button on the control panel. And you'll get paid overtime."

"Alright, I'll be there at nine." I clicked the phone shut and groaned, reading 8:07 on my computer screen. It looked like my much-needed working vacation was over.

After a grueling nighttime commute on the subway, a lengthy elevator ride up the Market Street high-rise, and a theatrical "Doctor Donato di Betto Bardi" into the voice-recognizing door, I made it to the lab by 9:10. If her labs kept getting blown up, why'd Karai keep putting them in the top floors of apartment buildings? I know she just inherited all the property from her father, but you'd think a warehouse or somewhere less populated would be a smarter location for something so volatile.

True to her word, the whole laboratory was empty but for myself. I hadn't even set foot in the new location yet, but seeing as they'd all been laid out the same, I set down the hallway to the largest room at the end, where three massive vats were full of blue-green lake muck. I'd been dreaming about this all week. I could tell the vats were teeming with life, all thick with slime and even home to a couple worms or tadpoles flagellating around inside. To most, it'd look pretty grotesque, but I suppose being a turtle makes my tastes a little unique.

Carefully lowering a burette underneath the tank and turning the spigot, I carried the muck over to the microscopes on the lab bench and dripped drops onto a few slides. On the first, I added another drop of Gram stain, and peered into the microscope's lens as I finely adjusted the knobs. Slowly but surely, whole colonies of dark purple spots and dashes appeared, as did a backdrop of the pink streaks I was looking for. The species I was after was a cyanobacteria, making it Gram-negative, and the dominant layer of pink on the slide all but confirmed I had struck gold.

Through my eye not pressed to the lens, a faint change in the room's light caught my eye. My neck snapped up to look at the security screen, where one of the six cameras appeared to be transmitting static. It definitely wasn't doing that when I'd walked in. Leaving the lab bench, I paced over to the window and peered out. All I could see from up there was the water and the Manhattan Bridge crossing it; anything down on the dark street was too distant to see. My eyes shot over to the screens again, picking up no action anywhere else the cameras could see. Either there had been a technical fluke, or someone pretty skilled in stealth was making their way in. I couldn't take any chances either way.

Maybe it was my imagination, but I could have sworn I heard a faint clunk from the floor below me. These labs were usually two or three stories tall, so I didn't know if it was someone in their apartment, or an air conditioner turning on, or something else. I know for a fact the door locked automatically behind me when I walked in, but I was still a little on edge. Going back to the lab bench, the same sound seemed to come from closer this time. Then, a few seconds later, it came again. Nothing was showing up on the cameras, but there was definitely something in the lab, and it was only getting closer to me. At the security panel, my eyes scanned every button for something that seemed like an appropriate response. But how does one respond to nothing?

Finally, the same sound seemed to have appeared on my level of the building. It originated from where the hallway met the open room I was standing in. Thinking fast, I grabbed the longest glass pipe from the rack nearest to me and shattered the tip on the table, leaving me with a three-foot jagged spear. I scanned the whole room for any signs of motion, and seeing nothing, moved delicately forward to what I thought was the source of the sound. I assumed the 'horse stance' I hadn't been in since the last time I held my bo staff, eyes glued on the end of the room.

A subtle click shook me from my glare. I looked up to see a small orb falling through the air vent right over my head. I batted the thing away, and it hit the floor beside me with an eruption of smoke. Something about the smoke grenade seemed oddly familiar, but I had no time to consider it as I tucked in and rolled back to safety, watching two shadowy figures open the vent and drop into the room just before my view was obscured in a haze. Through the boundless gray, I could make out a hulking silhouette running at me, and I regained my footing just in time to see a small projectile lobbed my way. I pushed it aside with the pipe in my hand, hearing the glass chip as I strafed aside. It didn't leave me with time to notice the second projectile coming right at my wrist, wrapping a chain tightly around and stopping my moving the pipe.

I yanked the chain forward, throwing its user off his feet and toward my makeshift spear. A rain of glass spilled off the metal of his armor and tinkled across the linoleum floor. Only half the pipe remaining in my hand, I slid my wrist out of its chain bond and kicked the assailant back into the heart of the smoke cloud. It displaced the air in the room and whipped the smoke in a circle around me, as a second shadow seemed to leap over the first and straight at me. I ducked down nimbly, letting him land behind me. Recovering his footing gave me enough time to sweep my leg around and knock him backward, but as I stood up, he shot a leg at my midsection quickly. I twisted to avoid it, but the kick landed right on the hologram projector clipped to my hip.

Clutching my side as I stepped back, I could see the "shell" of my disguise start to break up in jagged lines, then finally disappear. This little light show distracted my attackers enough to let me bust what remained of the pipe over my knee, and I lunged out both arms to hold the sharp glass to the necks of both shadows charging at me. They froze in their steps, and I watched the smoke gradually spiral toward the floor as I stood locked in a standoff. After a few tense moments, one of the assailants finally broke the silence.

"Don?" A metallic orange "T" embossed on black spandex was revealed to me as the smoke wound down.

"No fucking way…" The steel-armored figure opposite his partner raised a glove to his helmet and slid it off, revealing…
"Raph? Mikey?" I dropped the glass shanks in my hand, letting them shatter on the ground. "What on earth is going on?" Both of them closed in on me, practically mummifying me in a suffocating embrace. "Why are you here?"

"Uh, D, this is a Foot lab." Mike pointed a thumb back to the silk banner on the wall, bearing the company logo. "We should ask you the same thing."

"Needed something to occupy my time, I guess." I offered. Raph ground a gloved knuckle into the top of my skull, making me both wince and grin at the first of his noogies in what seemed an eternity.

"We all get into some weird shit when we got too much time on our hands, huh?" This was one of the first times in recent memory I'd classify Raphael as 'understanding'. "And for your information, Donnie, the Nightwatcher and the Turtle Titan came to get whoever was up here, out of here, 'cause there's a bomb in the air ducts one floor down that had twenty minutes left on the clock about four minutes ago."

"Dammit." I sighed. Sliding myself out of their death grips, I found the red plastic handle on the wall and pulled it down, sending the fire alarm off all across the building. Over the roar of the siren, I shouted, "We need to get as much of this water as we can out of here!"

"I don't think that's enough water to take out a bomb, Don!" Mikey yelled back.

"I'll explain when we get back to the lair!"

"Hauling Don's junk back to the lair for some hair-brained science experiment? Ain't this a trip down memory lane!" Raph shouted back, nudging Mike playfully in the chest. He squatted down in front of the tank with his arms underneath, and with a great heave, broke the whole thing off its frame. Mikey ran straight into the window, shield-first, sending a hailstorm of shards down to the street. Thinking quickly, he hurled his grappling hook out the window, snagging it on a chimney across the street and handing me the loose end as he hooked his shield across it and slid away. I fed the rope through an empty socket on the water tank's former support, and watched with baited breath as the glass vat dangled precariously across the line before thudding into Mike's waiting arms. Raph was the next to slide across, using his manriki as a hook.

Hurriedly dashing across to grab the sturdy metal microscope on the lab bench and leave my cellphone and hologram unit in its place, I snagged its frame on the rope, and tied the loose end around a heating pipe underneath the window frame. Trying not to look down at the accumulating crowd of building residents standing in the street far below, I skidded to a halt just as my feet could touch the roof on the other end. Raphael tossed a shuriken just feet above my head, slicing the rope close to the far end and leaving only a few inches hanging out the window. After the ordeal of getting the tank down the fire escape on the other side of the roof, we opened the manhole cover in the alley underneath, and slid it shut just in time to hear a muffled boom from above. By the time we made it down the ladder and into the tunnel, we could hear a thunderous rain of rubble hitting the streets overhead.

All short of breath as we sprinted away, none of us really exchanged words until we were back in the safety of the lair. Even then, Mike and Raph had the same routine of silently taking in the lair's aura for the first few minutes while I emptied the contents of the tank into my own container, sealing it shut to save for tomorrow's experimentation. My two brothers were plastered on the couches when I shut the lab's lights off, still catching their breath. I gave them the general rundown on just what I had been doing and what my plans were for the loot they helped me haul while they panted and got out of their costumes.

"So, you had Karai send dudes thousands of miles away to collect some pond slime, just for fuck's sake?" Raph asked.

"Partially, yes. But like I said, what I'm using it for in my research could change the whole world. At the very least, it'll mean free gas for the Battle Shell and your bike."

"That's rad, Donster." Mikey nodded in approval. "Mega rad."

"I think so, too." I smiled back.

For the first time in months, I shot the breeze with my brothers, hearing where they'd been and how they'd found each other again. I learned about Casey and April having a baby on the way, and after a good hour of long-forsaken banter, Mikey came forward with his theory on why Leo had left. Never the one to phrase something delicately, his accusation really rubbed me the wrong way.

"You're saying Leo and I had sex, and he freaked out about it and left?"

"Didn't mean to come across as rude or anything, D. But I saw what I saw that night, and it just made sense to me."

"Well…I don't really appreciate you two making such dubious theories about my personal business." Raph waved away my tense remark nonchalantly.

"You don't got to be so awkward about it, Don. This bozo and I aren't in any position to judge what makes you tick."

"All we wanna know is what happened, dude."

"Fine." I huffed a bit, pausing to recall the whole night's events. "One of mine and Leo's mutual interests happens to be classical Japanese poetry. Some of it tends to be pretty romantic, and we were in the lab, discussing one medieval-era piece about a kiss. We got around to talking about kissing in general, and how we'd never had our first kiss, and…for your information, that's all we were doing in my room. Nothing more."

The two of them turned silently to meet each other with a knowing look, and broke out in raucous laughter, Raph folding practically in half and Mikey slapping his knee.

"Donnie, you prude!" Raph wiped a tear from his eye.

"Dude, Leo standing outside Don's room, reciting some Shakespeare and telling him to cast down his long, flowing locks!" Mike's ridiculous analogy only reignited their laughter twice as loudly. I just sat there, smothered in half embarrassment, half relief from their apparent understanding.

"Well, I guess it wasn't just a kiss, but…"

"Man, we didn't mean to laugh at you. Our bad, bro." Mikey leveled when their laughter finally died down. "It's just…"

"What this clown's trying to say is, we're happy for you, Don." Raph smiled. "It's, uh, something I didn't really understand at first, but I guess Mikey helped open my eyes, and…"

"The only difference is, after I gave my big bro his first kiss, he didn't disappear off into the night like a big baby." Mikey interrupted.

"I think you're right about that." I offered. "It was one of the first times I'd seen Leo not so stressed out and tense, but when he went back to his room afterward, he was still acting like he'd…I don't know, done something against the rules. It was the same look you had in your eyes after breaking the paper door to Splinter's room with your basketball when we were kids, Mike."

"But he didn't say anything to you before he left either?" Raph asked.

"Nope. Sounds like we have his motive, but still no idea about his location."

"Stuck right where we were before." Mike groaned.

After a well-deserved night of sleep, the silence of the lair in the morning was broken by Raph leaving Mike's room, trudging to the kitchen in a tired haze and pouring himself a cup of the coffee I'd left in the pot. He firmly placed a palm on my shoulder as I looked at the results of some preliminary experimentation with the sample bacteria.

"Don, this is gonna sound like some shit out the Twilight Zone, but last night, Mikey had a good idea about your work."

"Michelangelo's interested in my biofuel research?" My eyes lit up.

"Uh, not really. But you told us last night that you found the right kind of lake muck using some kind of satellite, right? Could find its DNA from space?"

"Really, any molecular sequence, limited of course by the satellite's capacity to detect minute differences in the spectral emissions of larger molecules. The bacteria had small enough plasmids that I could find a near-exact match."

"Right…" The details were clearly lost on Raph. "Well, Mikey said it made you sound like Professor Xavier outta the X-Men. You know, with Cerebro, that big computer that detects all the mutants?"

"Not too far off of a comparison."

"So…couldn't you use your computer to do the same thing? Like, 'find all the mutants'? Well, not all of 'em necessarily, but just…"

"…Leo."

"I was gonna say, didn't you already read our DNA for some research on the mutagen a while ago? Or did you just have Leo spit in a cup for…personal reasons?" he chuckled.

"I still have the sequences saved." I opened a folder buried deep in the corner of my desktop's clutter, dragged the file marked "Leonardo" into the program I'd written earlier for work, and watched as the satellite map wiped its previous markings clean while the new ones loaded up. "Because our DNA is much more complex than a bacteria's, it won't show solely perfect matches, but…" Sure enough, the earth looked nearly the same, save for the three red blips clustered around Midtown Manhattan. I zoomed out further, looking for the same red hue. Some red rocks in the Mojave deceived my eye, as did a red algal bloom in the Caspian Sea, but these didn't help me. Panning the map all around, my mind reeled as I tried to fathom where he could be.

"If there's only three red spots, does that mean he's..." Raph cleared his throat. "You know, dead?"

"No, some DNA would still remain in its whole form for months, maybe even years before fully decomposing." Finally, a glint of red caught my eye, just off the southern tip of Kamchatka. "Assuming he didn't fall into a volcano or anything."


This chapter is a friggin' horse! 3,590 words, that's the third largest chapter I've ever wrote out of fifty-four!

For the curious, the 'finale' (the Leo-centric Right View) will probably be even longer. Prepare your eyes before staring ravenously at the screen for longer than an hour lmaooo

The reason 'finale' is in quotes is because, after the finale and two epilogues, there's still a lot of time on my hands, and I still have a lot of plots drafted for the Turtles that don't really relate to the whole 'theme' of the Eightfold Path. If more people keep on reading, I'll know I should let the story roll on and see where we can go with it.

The 'right mindfulness' in this chapter is Don's ability to hold his own in the lab after not practicing ninjitsu in months, and taking into account how he's usually the least skilled in combat out of all four.

Thanks for the reads, dawg!