TMNT= Not Mine

Because Nick is doing my head in with the inconsistencies. For DeeMG, who is becoming incredibly disturbed that Michelangelo is a genuinely stupid character in Nick-verse and that his family still picks on him despite his mental inadequacy. Hopefully this will make her feel better about it.

His brothers were idiots. This realisation had slowly been building over his life as he noticed a few glaring inconsistencies of their lives that his brothers remained oblivious to. Scratch that, his brothers were stupid. Or maybe he was a genius and no one had bothered to acknowledge it.

"Like, like the algae and worms thing," he mumbled drunkenly into the lap of the really, really weirdly dressed lady.

He couldn't exactly recall how he'd gotten into this situation. There he was, minding his own business skating down a sewer pipe when he'd been attacked by a strange glowing…thing. It had gone for his head and chomped down really painfully and something inside of him broke. He wasn't sure what it was but he was pretty sure it was an intangible part of him. He'd been taken down by a spiritual attack by something that looked like a glowing furby. Why was he not surprised that this was the way things would end for him?

"It'll be okay Mikey," the stranger soothed. It sounded like she was crying. He didn't know who she was but it was pretty clear she knew him…probably from another dimension. The woman had appeared out of thin air after all before banishing his attacker. And she was covered in clocks and hourglasses. Right. "Just keep focused and tell me why the algae and worms thing didn't make sense."

"Okay. It all ties in how weird Sensei is. Like. Really, really weird. Like, rarely leaves the sewer ever weird. The guy is a ninjitsu Master. And he was human. And yet for some reason he saw fit to raise us on algae and worms. My brothers just accepted it. I mean, come on. When he did bother going to the surface, he got lettuce for Spike. You know real food. He got real food for Raph's stupid pet turtle and gave us disgusting algae and worms," Michelangelo raged. "What kind of messed up reasoning is that?"

"That's…good," the lady said, though she couldn't hide the grossed out look on her face. "Were there any other incidents of weirdness?"

Mikey let out a half-hysterical laugh. "Splinter didn't seem capable of leaving the lair. He was always like, here's how you defeat this enemy. I'll just stay down here and stick my thumbs up my nose and ignore that my sons are in danger. And then, then there was that incident with the phone. Our very existence was under the risk of exposure and what did Splinter do? He used it as a training exercise to teach Raphael how to control his anger. That guy could have had the video uploaded to the internet in a matter of seconds and we had to play nice instead. And-and then he got mutated into a ginormous butt ugly spider and he decided to kill us! What was up with that? Do normal humans secretly have raging psychopaths inside, just waiting to be mutated so they can unleash their inner fury? That guy was a stupid Joe average. And why could he spit acid? Spiders don't spit acid. WHY?"

"There are some things that are just inexplicable," his companion said sympathetically. "I'm afraid you're paying the price right now for noticing them."

"I'm dying," Mikey stated dully. He didn't feel like he was dying actually. More like he had a bad case of indigestion. "I'm dying and I'll never understand why my family got mutated into humanoid creatures and why Snakeweed and Spiderbytes got mutated into monsters. And why we never saw pizza on the television and yet we watched news reports and cartoons. Also, why did Don decide to plug a military AI into a music player? For someone commonly described as a technogeek and genius, that did not seem all that smart. And then there was that time, with Rad-Brad and Xever. When Rad-Brad stuck his sword into the mutagen bomb and sent a wave of it into the streets. What did my brothers do? They celebrated. And then they had the gall to look at me like I was the crazy one when I didn't join. A whole tidal wave of mutagen had gone into the street and we were insanely lucky that only Shredder's goons were the ones that got mutated. Or maybe we just never saw the other victims. Also. Still dying."

"In a way," the stranger brushed his forehead comfortingly. "You got hit by, well; the concept is a bit hard to explain. It's a temporal modifying monster that feeds on intelligence. It just ate a large chunk of your mind and, uh, since it's a temporal creature-"

"-My entire existence is being written," Michelangelo groaned. His eyes slid shut against the pain. "I'm going to be an idiot," he said with horror.

"Only in this dimension though," the stranger offered, chewing a lip nervously. "It's really not that bad."

The turtle raised his head to glare at her. "Hello! Existence being rewritten to stupid here. I think it's pretty damn bad!"

"Well at least it wasn't a spatial modifier that got you," the interdimensional traveller defended herself weakly. "Then you'd genuinely be stupid across all dimensions. And you won't uh, notice all the inconsistencies around you this time."

"Small mercies," Mikey muttered bitterly. "But that isn't going to be me, is it?"

The stranger's eyes grew round and sad. "No," she said softly. "It's not going to be you. Well. It will be you but it won't be you. It's complicated. The other downside on a much larger scale is that the new Mikey is going to be very unstable, dimensionally speaking. Everything else hasn't been changed but you have. Your family is going to instinctively rebel against the new Mikey because he won't feel right to them."

"Wonderful," the turtle muttered sullenly. After a moment's consideration, he brightened. "Don's crush on April won't be so painful to watch anymore, right?"

The stranger gave a wan smile. "Yeah," she affirmed.

"Eh," Mikey said. "I can live with that."