The Foot Clan's headquarters were located in a sleek, modern-looking building that overlooked a dazzling cityscape of light and glimmering glass. Inside, the ninja citadel hosted many different facilities necessary for the smooth running of the clan; it was no longer an option to rely entirely on tradition and past knowledge in a modern age.
One of those facilities was a large, brightly-lit laboratory on the seventeenth floor, where a cluster of scientists loyal to the Foot Clan worked on projects that had been deemed necessary by Oroku Saki, Master Shredder, the jonin of the clan. On one of the counters was a large aquarium, filled inside with sand, rocks, a small pool of water and a few artificial palm trees — the ideal place to keep four small turtles.
However, they only had one turtle.
He crept along the sandy floor of his new habitat, small dark eyes blinking at what little he could see outside it. His brothers should be here. Why weren't they here? He couldn't see them, smell them, hear them. His tiny flippers scuffed at the sand as he crawled around, searching for some sign that he wasn't alone in the tank.
He had been in the bag before. His brothers had been in the bag. They were all jumbled together with no room to move — and then suddenly he had been carried off by a monster. Now he was in a new place, a new aquarium. Where were they? They were supposed to be with him.
Finally the tiny turtle stopped his meanderings, his tiny sides puffing with exertion under his shell. Someone or something nudged him, just to make sure that he was still alive, and sent him skittering into the tiny pond. Loud noises came from outside it, from the huge creatures that hovered over the aquarium, watching him carefully.
He didn't feel well. His mind was too simple to grasp the idea that he might be sick, but he did know that he felt oddly stretched, as though something was pulling his tiny body in every direction. It didn't hurt, exactly, but it wasn't pleasant either.
He scrambled onto a small rock, his head rocking to and fro. Where were his brothers?
"Do you truly expect me to believe what you're saying?" Karai said sharply, fingering her katana.
The ninja kneeling before her did not raise his head, as if he expected to lose it any second now.
Karai's eyes narrowed. She had a very low tolerance for failure, and an even lower tolerance for lies to cover up those failures.
"You expect me to believe that you were attacked by a rat, and that is why you lost the chemicals and the turtles?" she said furiously.
The ninja flinched slightly, visible in his body language.
One turtle.
They had been sent to retrieve four turtles and a collection of chemicals, and they returned with one turtle smeared in the remains of those lost substances. The other turtles, so the Foot ninja insisted, had been abducted by a rat that had attacked them. A rat, of all things — an ordinary rodent. A ridiculous story. As if two ninja of the mighty Foot Clan could be so easily defeated by a common pest.
Karai's eyes slid over to the large aquarium, where the one lone turtle was crawling on its tiny flippers, scrambling across the sandy ground in search of something. The little creature seemed to be in distress, perhaps at the loss of the other three turtles.
She supposed that one turtle was as good as four — it wasn't as if they really needed all four of them to discover what the Foot's enemies were up to — but she could hardly let the ineptitude slide.
"Master Shredder will decide your fate," she said briskly, moving past the groveling ninja.
"Yes, Lady Karai," the man mumbled at his own knees.
She moved swiftly past him and headed for the elevator, seeing the genin and scientists scurry out of her way as she did. But before she left the lab, she glanced back again at the baby turtle. She wasn't entirely sure how losing the creature was supposed to cause trouble for the Foot Clan's enemy — surely they could just buy another clutch of turtles for their experiments.
"Rats," Karai muttered to herself.
She turned the ridiculous story over in her head as the elevator whisked her to the rooftop of the building, where her grandfather was often to be found when he wasn't holding court in his throne room. Oroku Saki often liked to look out over the city, perhaps meditating on the total control he would have over it soon enough. Karai suspected so.
As the doors opened, she composed her face to hide her anger at the fools who had lost the turtles and the chemicals. Her grandfather had little tolerance for her anger unless he shared it, and she didn't yet know how angry he would be.
He was standing near the edge of the building, surrounded by four Elite guards, with his hawk Koya perched on one of his bladed gauntlets. His mask and metal helmet hid his expressions from anyone, giving him the look of a steel-plated god of vengeance and war, immovable and unshakeable.
At the moment, the only other person who was there to see them was Chet Allen. Karai's lip curled slightly at the sight of him. He was a meek, mewling scientist who worked for StockGen; he had approached the Foot Clan some months ago about the ambitious warlord known as General Krang, who had contracted StockGen to do work for him. It was through Allen's involvement that they had known about the experiments at StockGen in the first place.
As Karai understood it, the chemicals the two ninja had stolen included a powerful mutagen meant to create super-soldiers. That was something that ought to be in the Foot's hands, not Krang's.
Karai didn't trust him. She didn't trust most people. But she trusted this stuttering outsider less than most, as she didn't consider "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" to be a guarantee of loyalty or fidelity.
"—and I b-believe that the timetable will be set back d-drastically if we're successful," he was saying. "Your scientists may be able to use th-them effectively with my help."
Karai chose that moment to stride in front of her grandfather, and bowed deeply. When he gestured for her to rise, she did so.
"And what of the mission?" he said in his deep, rolling voice.
"It went — badly, Grandfather," she said hesitantly. "The mutagen beakers were smashed outside of StockGen, and all but one of the turtles were lost."
Allen visibly squirmed at the mention of the turtles. "Oh dear," he murmured.
Karai ignored him. His information had ultimately led to nothing, so she wasn't sure why the mighty leader of the Foot Clan was still tolerating his insipid presence.
"Even worse," she said, "the ninja dispatched on this mission were seen, and the alert has been raised. Our enemies will know what we have done."
Shredder was silent, his eyes unreadable under the shadow of his helmet.
"They knew already," he said at last.
"Master Shredder?"
"This ultimately changes nothing. When more of the mutagen has been developed, we will strike again, and this time it will not be lost."
Karai was about to respond when the sound of running footsteps rang out in the hall behind her. One of the lower-ranking genin was racing forward, his eyes wide underneath his mask. He darted past her like a cat, and dropped to his knees before the master of the Foot Clan.
"Master, something has happened in the laboratory. Something to do with—with the turtle that was brought back from StockGen," the man panted. "Something happened to it — they don't know what—"
Shredder made a slicing gesture with one hand, and the genin fell silent, bowing his head and awaiting further orders.
Karai felt a spurt of annoyance. So the one creature brought back from that disaster of a mission was probably dead. Did it even matter now? The StockGen scientists would likely just buy new ones, and then the experiments would continue unabated. Her fingers tightened on her sword as she prepared to punish the stupid man for his interruption.
But to her surprise, her grandfather immediately left the rooftop, the Elite following a few steps behind him. Karai hurried to follow him as well, and hear the pattering footsteps of Chet Allen directly behind her. Her lip curled, but she said nothing.
She followed her grandfather through the labyrinthine halls of the Foot Clan's headquarters, moving in his wake like a small boat behind a larger one. When they arrived at the laboratory, she saw that the scientists were standing in a huddle outside the laboratory door, some of them clutching one another. One was sobbing, the others were casting frightened looks inside.
All this for a turtle? Karai thought disbelievingly. The creature was only an inch or so long, and probably sick from the chemical exposure. What was so important about the stupid little animal that the powerful Oroku Saki had to be called to see it?
Her grandfather stopped in the doorway and looked in. And when Karai looked into the room, she found that she was looking at her answer.