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It almost looks like -For a moment - just one - a memory scratches at Raphael’s mind; jutting vertical shafts across a great expanse of space, rippling with dense, green foliage. Then the itch is gone, crushed to dust beneath decades of sepia wasteland glare.It isn’t a forest. Not really . . . at least, as much as he can recall one to compare. It cuts up from the horizon in striking jagged shapes, a mosaic of deep greens, lurid teals and garish purples, and it catches the piercing desert sun in a thousand glittering, razor-edged places. The sky above it carries an unnatural violet haze broken only by disparate crackles of effervescent lightning.It is as beautiful as a mirror shattering in your face and, by all local accounts, about as friendly.“Raph, time to pull over.” A magenta glow intrudes on the edge of his vision, accompanied by the soft whirring of servos and hum of electronics. Donatello leans in past the driver’s seat, his unreadable gaze fixed on the prismatic horizon. What they are driving along can hardly be called a road, but Raph tears his eyes from it anyway to glare at his brother.“Wha? Why? There’s still a few miles to go ‘til we get to -” Even as he says it, he can feel his voice beginning to rasp against his throat, each breath a little heavier than it should be and driving through his lungs with a faintly acidic sting. He hasn’t realised until now the pressure building against his temples, or the sluggish effort now required to blink. “Damn. Already?”“Well, can’t say I didn’t warn ya,” Donatello chirps, infuriatingly cheerful. He pats Raph’s shoulder with a clink clink. Raphael runs a hand over his face, groaning his frustration, but he eases his foot off the gas and switches over to the brake as if he might suddenly lose the coherence to do it safely. “Are you kiddin’ me? I thought we’d at least get closer than this, just in case -”“In case you need to charge in and rescue me. Really?” The subtle head swivel, the asymmetrical drift of his antennae and the lilting pitch of Donnie’s modulated voice blaze robotic sarcasm. “After that ambush outside Drywelt, and based on a sample size of 486 relevant scenarios, the ratio of brotherly rescues currently stands at 55:26. In whose favour, d’ya think?”Raph’s glare deepens, burnished heavily with an unspoken ‘That’s not what I meant’. Donnie quickly relents in the face of it and throws a sheepish shrug. “Ehh . . . sorry, Raph. I mean, who’s even counting , right? But we talked about this. Much as I’d like otherwise, you wouldn’t last five minutes in there. It’s safer this way.” A brooding frown has engraved itself on Raphael’s already surly face.They pull over.“Hey, once I’m out, I think you should head back a little,” Donnie warns as he wrenches open the Shellraiser door. “Maybe a couple hundred yards. Your rebreather’s kinda out of its league here and I’m getting atmospheric toxicity readings at this position that are a smidgen higher than the level I’d call ‘probably won’t kill ya’. Not immediately but it won’t exactly do you any good -”“This is a terrible idea, Don,” Raph cuts him off with a grunt. He hasn’t left his seat but he twists around in it as far as his hulking frame will allow, eyeing his brother’s silhouette in the eerie light from outside. It gives the robot pause; his antennae sweep low and his mechanical frame seems suddenly awkward. Raphael knows that hesitation - the clash between a machine that has run the numbers, and a mind that is still just illogical enough to defy them anyway.“If you remembered her,” Donnie says quietly, “you wouldn’t think so.” His robot brother squares his shoulders and hops out into the torrid dust.Raphael growls. In the cabin, something tinkles softly in Donnie’s wake. He automatically raises a hand to the shattered pieces of a metal tessen, stilling their musical dance. His touch is deceptively gentle.“Keep your comm line open!” he roars after Donatello, but he is not correctly armed to make further argument. “My old Ma told me it’s been around almost as long as the M-Bomb crater.”“So’s the blister I got on my big toe,” Raphael muttered. “That don’t impress me much.”Donatello’s library of pop culture filled in the missing Oh Oh Oh-ohhh. He almost sang the notes (well, played an actual recording of Shania’s lovely rural twang), but his current audience was a mutated gecko born too late to experience human country pop music and Raphael at his wasteland-business-surliest, who probably wouldn’t even remember the reference.Clearly his talent was wasted here.“So these ‘Sharding Wastes’ didn’t exist immediately after M-Day,” Donnie instead said, a little pointedly, “but rose up some time afterward. That could make ‘em pretty unconventional . . . with potentially unconventional salvage.”The gecko looked at him, and casually licked her eyeball.“Hey, now. That thing’s pretty smart. It for sale?”Raph’s fist slammed down beside the lumpy leather bag of questionable odour currently sitting in the middle of the diner table. A few nearby denizens of the dim, grubby waterhole turned to cast an eye over the gathering, and promptly turned around again when they saw the unfriendly set of the turtle’s jaw.“That ‘thing’ is my brother - no, don’t even ask - and you’re wasting our time. This is grade A mutascorpion meat right here and so far you ain’t earned it. Is there anything valuable there or not?”Good ol’ Raph, straight to the practical matters. The gecko hooted, leaning over to punch him in the shoulder as though he’d made a winning joke, and utterly oblivious to the fact that the old turtle was not, in fact, laughing with her. She had to massage her knuckles when she pulled her hand back.“Sure, sure! I mean, I don’t know , but a place ain’t ‘forbidden’” she spat, “unless it’s got the good stuff in it.”Raph settled back with a huff, the threadbare alcove seating groaning under his weight. “Then it’ll have been raided a hundred times already.” “Yeah. Yeah, y’ain’t wrong. Plenty of mutants have tried their luck.” The gecko took a terribly conspicuous sip of the mulch that passed for drinking water here, and grinned. “Not that anyone ever came back.” Donatello finds the first corpses about half a mile from where he and Raph part ways. The landscape of death tells a particular story to his analytic modules; a rusted salvage van stands tall, silent, the open driver-side door creaking disdainfully in a hot, sluggish breeze. The mummified bones of the driver lie some ten feet away, following a meandering route from the truck cabin that suggests a desperate crawl.Donnie can’t narrow down the species to anything more than ‘canine’, given the diversity of wasteland’s mutant population, but the delicate finger bones collapsed about the neck make the cause of death pretty obvious. His sensors have been detecting fatal levels of breathable oxygen for some time now - and the permeation of chemicals and elements that are not in any way native to Earth.Not native, no. But familiar to him, nonetheless.He looks up, briefly, at what is left of Earth’s sky. Even in the distance, far from the so-called Sharding Wastes, its ravaged atmosphere bleeds magenta and is laced with deceptively beautiful cyan chemtrails. The Mutagen Bomb had taken a sledgehammer to the fabric of their world and it had shattered, sure enough - but like toughened glass, the pieces still cling together around a lattice of spidery cracks. You can see the vagaries of Dimension X through them; sometimes, it even seeps through, and the places that it does quickly become the Places We Don’t Go To Anymore. Donnie has theories upon theories on the long-term stability of the situation, but he keeps them mostly to himself.They don’t make for pleasant conversation.And they’re not important, not right now. What’s important is that the only other place his scanners have picked up Dimension X contamination of this level has been the M-Bomb crater itself - hundreds of miles away. How a little pocket of Dimension X landscape design could have sprung up so far from Ground Zero is an unresolved query, and this mystery could still unravel any number of ways.But there is one possibility in particular that stands out from the others, glowing like a beacon amidst the array of potential predicted outcomes. With every step, Donatello ticks another box.He opens the back of the van and finds three more unfortunates there, curled up in various states of agony. This is classified as tragic , a subroutine acknowledges somewhere, and Donnie’s head drops, emitting a sad sigh.“You guys had no idea what you were getting into here, did you?”He scans the vehicle for potential salvage.Fuel, weapons, some outdated but useful engine parts that put the salvage crew at maybe fifteen years dead. Parts of the van itself could be stripped down for decent scrap metal. It occurs to him that he and Raph could pick up some useful resources just by scouting the bodies and abandoned vehicles that doubtless ring the Wastes. He runs some projections on how lucrative that would be, the potential distances the salvage seekers might have penetrated, and the most likely locations on the circumference to find the good stuff based on distance and vectors from known populations - but they’re loose estimates. Who knows how many mutants have tried and failed to reach that lurid array of alien colour on the horizon?The engine of the salvage van needs a little encouragement, but he soon has it purring like a particularly angry and sputtering kitten.“Sorry, fellas,” Donnie announces to his trio of long-dead passengers (his brief skeletal analysis has at least identified the corpses as likely males), “but I kinda need it more than you do.”The notion to contact Raph and let him know the morbidly good scavenging news comes, and goes. Instead he files away the task for later, several rungs down his priority queue.Donatello’s mission stopped being about scavenging as soon as the gecko mentioned the witch. Raphael actually laughed. It sounded like a broken tuba.“The ‘Witch of the Wastes’? What, the wasteland doesn’t have enough actual threats in it that you had to go and invent some fairy tale ?”Their intrepid advisor snaked her fingerpads over the bribe bag, sensing a victory; Raph issued a warning grunt, but let her take it.“Look, nobody can get close to the place, right?” she insisted. “But plenty tried. Some got far enough in and were smart enough to realise they were gonna choke to death on their own tongues, that they turned back. Brought stories with them. Maybe half-dying drove ‘em mad but they said they saw things. Strange creatures. What they thought were . . . trees, I think they were called? Except they were all made of some kinda glass. And . . . her.”Raphael raised an eyebrow.“The Witch of the Sharding Wastes,” she nodded eagerly. “Legends go back pretty damn far. The Wastes are her domain and all of its danger is her doing. One guy even said he saw her twist his friend into a horrible monster, right in front of his eyes.”Donnie sat up a little straighter in the booth, and his brother glanced sideways at the sudden twitch of his antennae. “You call the Witch a ‘she’,” he remarked, trying earnestly not to hum with curiosity. “If that’s more than guesswork, someone must have got a pretty good look at her.”“The survivors said she was pink, mostly hairless, no scales or nothin’.” The gecko leaned in closer and lowered her voice, her huge eyes shifting left and right. “Y’know . . . like one of those humans?” For half a mile, Donatello follows a road toward the dense teal walls of the Wastes proper that is littered with death and destruction. In the reclaimed truck he weaves between wasting vehicle carcasses and the occasional pale, bleached glints of bone that creep out from the desert grit. A quiet little subroutine somewhere is keeping a morbid tally.And then - nothing. A stretch of unmarked desert between him and the walls. Only the tiniest traces of Earth’s atmospheric elements remain detectable on his sensors and the horizon offers up one last relic of a hopeless attempt to penetrate the Wastes; it is a lonely truck, its sides and top torn open like a paper bag, wheels strewn across the sands and innards exposed to the alien skies. Donnie dwells on the image of it, while the gecko’s descriptions of feverish survivor stories replay verbatim in his head.His memories are too perfect now. The limitations, the filters imposed by organic matter are gone, replaced by note-perfect recall. They looted some valuable screens from the skeleton of an old mall, once, and used them to outfit the Shellraiser. Donnie had considered hooking himself up to one and playing those memories back for Raphael. If anything could shift his brother’s amnesia, maybe their lives before the M-Bomb played out like a movie in front of his very eyes would do the trick?But he had dropped the idea, aggressively so. Their lives, even at the best of times, have not been like a movie. For every shining moment in their past there is something dark and cutting lurking just a little ways along the timeline, just waiting to come and sweep it all away. And sometimes that dark and cutting thing is simply the awful truth about the people they loved, about themselves , unobscured by the haze of desperate nostalgia, every terrible decision and grimy flaw available for viewing in full high definition.There are good times in that sequence, yes. But there are also very, very bad times.So Donatello remains selective. When Raphael is feeling so orphaned from their past that he gets that . . . that look in his eyes, he breaks out the cheery stories, the victories and the laughs.The worst tales he keeps for his private recollection.He slows down when he sees the trees. He’s almost there now, welcomed by this gleaming, jagged forest to the walls of the Wastes.Trees made out of glass, the gecko said.But they’re not trees, and it’s not glass. Not really. “You know, you really ain’t very good at selling this place.” Raph’s smile was broad and unpleasant.“Hey, you wanted information! Well, I know what you actually want is loot.” Suddenly smug, the gecko girl rummaged around in the pocket of her tattered, baggy combats. “Take a look at this.”What she set on the table was the tiniest sliver of a Kraang power cell crystal. Donatello leaves the salvage van a five minute walk from the walls of the Wastes, because the ‘trees’ become too dangerously dense, and the ground between them a minefield of shiny, unpredictable crystal growth. At best, they’d rip the vehicle’s tyres to shreds.At worst, they’d shatter beneath the thick rubber treads, and he’d be coasting back to Raph on the mushroom cloud of an alien explosion.It’s 59 minutes and 35 seconds since he left the Shellraiser and, like clockwork, he picks up the incoming signal from Raph’s T-phone. Donnie hasn’t needed to use one for a long, long time; instead, he twitches his antennae into a more efficient position and says aloud: “Hey, Raph. Still alive! Well, in a manner of speaking.”Raph’s return grunt sounds over his speakers. “How’s it lookin’? Seen her yet?”“Nope, nothing moving out here so far.”“What about stuff that ain’t moving, but should be?”Donatello considers sugar-coating his reply, but Raphael heard the gecko’s spiel. “Plenty of dead on the way here, I admit. Most killed by the atmosphere, though. Plenty of salvage!”“ Most ? Ngghh. I don’t like it.”“Be quicker for you to give me the list of things you do like, Raph,” Donnie says, managing to somehow make vocal the eyeroll he’s no longer capable of performing. “Look, it’s Kraang terraforming for sure. I’m gonna take a quick look around, and I’ll call you if I find anything. I’m at the walls now.”They’re not walls. Not really. Donatello stares up - and up, and up - at those sheer iridescent vertices. From a distance, they look like a solid barrier surrounding the core of the Sharding Wastes. Only this close can his sensors work around the weird refractions of light and see the intermittent breaks in it, the slight teetering curvature of the towering luminous cliffs. They’ve formed as if a massive fist smashed into a lake of liquid crystal at the centre of the Wastes, and the waves rippled outward but froze before they could crash back down to earth.It makes the way in . . . complicated. Before him lie labyrinthine, glistening passages through the segmented walls. He steps inside the first, and is instantly confronted with a dozen distorted reflections of himself crawling along the purplish-turquoise surfaces.It’s disorienting, but it’s also a surprising novelty; clear pools of water or vanity items like full body mirrors aren’t exactly commonplace in the desert wasteland. He rests his hand on a crystalline wall and stares into the magenta glow of his own visor.And recoils.It isn’t that he doesn’t know what he looks like now. He designed his own form. But he is supposed to be Donatello, and even after all this time, when he looks at his reflection . . .Some rogue piece of code expects to see something else.He turns away, marching off through the maze of crystal with his head down, antennae scything a low arc. It’s a bug. Just a stupid software bug, a failed logic check somewhere. He’ll root it out later, fix it so that it never crosses his mind again. And yet, if he can’t recognise himself . . .
How will she?
Despite his best efforts to divert them, the conundrum plagues his cybercortex processors as he ventures deeper into the Sharding Wastes. If his brain were still organic, he would have been lost fifteen minutes in, faced at every turn by mirror walls of crystal that look exactly the same as the last set he’d avoided looking at. He keeps track of every step taken, however - number, distance, angle from point of entry - and knows he could get out exactly the way he came in. There is no fear, no uncertainty.Convenient. Inhuman.But then, that has always been the problem, hasn’t it? Even before. One of the greatest highlights in Donatello’s lifetime reel is the moment he realised she was a mutant, too - not that it was enough. It was never enough, and now he’s never been less -The ground pitches beneath his feet - and keeps trembling, a low alarming rumble that vibrates through every sturdy mechanical joint. Donatello comes to a dead halt, all sensors on high alert. An inbound communication from Raph pings his digital ear, but when he opens the channel he can barely make out the words through the hiss of disruptive static.“Don - kssssssttttt - something out - kssshhhhhttttttttt - see that?”But of course, he can’t, because he’s in a canyon of crystal so narrow he can touch both walls at the same time, and can see nothing that isn’t ahead, behind or directly above him. His other sensors are picking up something, though; an increase in electromagnetic interference, breaking up his communication signal, and a sudden drop in barometric pressure. The physical reverberations at his feet can hardly be ignored, either.“Raph, you’re breaking up,” Donnie yells, charging ahead to the end of his narrow passageway. It opens up into a intersection of sorts, broadening for a spell before four more paths through the labyrinth head off in different directions.A scratchy, clinking howl screeches down the eastern and northern paths. The sky above them roils dark and violent, and Donatello can see movement in the distance, a strange cloud churning its way toward him like a translucent steamroller.“You’d - ksssshhhtttttttttt - near - ksssttttttttttttt - orstorm!” “You said nobody made it back,” Donnie accused the gecko. “Where did you get that?”“If we get a bad blowout in these parts and it crosses the Sharding Wastes before it gets to us, it carries this stuff with it. Pretty bad news. Always casualties.” Suddenly solemn, she picked up the shard between thumb and forefinger pad and frowned at it.“We call it a razorstorm.” It is barrelling in his direction, a frenzy of wind and storm pressure forming a whirling dervish of loose crystal shards. Casualties, the gecko had said; no surprise, given the force behind that engine of destruction can probably flay anything organic to ribbons in seconds.And his metal shell won’t fare much better.“Donni - kssshhhht - to a - kssssstttttttsss - fe place! Do - ksssshhhhttttttssss - ead me?!”Raph’s sputtering attempts to reach him crackle in and out as Donnie retreats the way he came.“I’m trying, Raph! Give me a second here.”He can’t outrun it. There’s no easy cover in the sheer walls of crystal. Donnie runs anyway, calculations spinning away in his system to figure out how the labyrinthine passages can be used to evade the coming storm. He is painfully aware of a subsidiary threat, vibrating all around him as the crystal shakes with the force of the unnatural disaster.“- kssshhhhttttt - comin’ after you!”A flood of warning alerts almost makes him screech to a halt. Donnie yells reflexively down the comm line: “DON’T YOU DARE! You’ll kill yourself! Raph, stay put , d’ya hear me?! I’ll be fine as long as - ” CRACK.He catches it before it shatters - a jagged black line splitting the wall to his left from top to bottom. The whine of rapidly building unstable energy.A fuschia explosion fills every sensor with light and heat and sound.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“We’re not splittin’ up.”Raphael’s iron tone brooked no argument - but that had never stopped Donatello before. The robot swivelled in his seat, one antenna flitting earthwards. It was the only raised eyebrow he could muster. Behind him, and in not-so-subtle defiance, the Shellraiser’s monitor array displayed multiple views, scans and topographical maps of the area dominated by the so-called Sharding Wastes.His brother was glowering at him from his usual spot in the driver’s seat. “We don’t even need any Kraang power cells right now.”A metallic sigh wheezed from the console. “Y’know, I beg to differ. I got a list of 5,392 potential projects that could easily use a couple.”“And how many of those are important? Or doable?”“Ehh.” Donatello waved a vague hand. “Details.”The Shellraiser groaned; Raphael eased his bulk out of the front seat and chose to settle down on the floor near his brother, wearing one of those incredibly earnest, determined expressions that Donatello disliked.“It ain’t about that, though. There’s somethin’ else,” he said. “Talk to me, Don.”He disliked them because they were effective. Donatello spun his chair around, his hands coming to rest on the keyboard . . . but they didn’t type anything. Instead he curled them up into loose fists.“The ‘witch’ . . .” he ventured slowly. “I think she might be . . . April.”This was a waste of time. Donnie couldn’t convince Raph how important this was when he couldn’t remember . But, nonetheless, the old turtle’s eyes widened and a gush of newfound understanding softened his features.“The girl. Your April.”“No, not mine.” That retort had been overly-defensive, but when it came to April there were behavioural triggers in his programming that resisted all logical adaptation. “Ours! She was as much a part of Clan Hamato as you were.”“But how could she . . .” Raphael blew out a confused breath through his nose. “The M-Bomb killed her. I thought we already knew that. It killed her just like it killed Casey.”Another name that was just a faint, familiar drop in a dark ocean to Raph. Donatello often caught him musing over that mask-covered skull on the dashboard, trying to pin disparate thoughts and fragments of memories together.“But April wasn’t a human, Raph. She was a mutant, just like us. We never knew for sure. It was always a possibility that she -”“I hate to break it to ya, Don, but being a mutant didn’t exactly help you out when the bomb dropped.”Raphael flinched after he’d said it, but he didn’t take it back. And why should he? Blunt as it was, it was true. Donnie’s organic body, mutated or no, had met its messy end in the face of the mutagen apocalypse. It was a variable he hadn’t failed to consider, and yet -“You made it. Karai made it,” he said firmly. “Karai thrived.” He thought of their old once-foe, now wayward-kinda-sibling, and her mutant Foot marauders. They still left delightfully sassy letters to each other at designated dead drops, competing for the best wasteland victories. Her last note had read: ‘Liberated Dirt Valley from the Mongrel Tyrants and claimed their riverbed base (stick that in your USB port and smoke it). Maybe stop by when you’re in the area - promise not to blow you up on sight.’“And besides,” he persisted, “April wasn’t just a mutant - she had Kraang DNA! Mutagen didn’t even affect her. Don’t you remember?”The phrase slipped out before he could override the configurable error ratio that allowed him to mis-speak from time to time. It made organics infinitely more comfortable in open dialogue, but this particular sequence of words had occasionally caused him a lot of repair work on the Shellraiser. That, and the timing of it couldn’t have been more atrocious.“No , Donnie.” Raphael’s words were ice. “I don’t.”They lapsed into a grim silence, staring each other down. Donatello’s fixed magenta gaze could hardly falter, but it was still a surprise when Raphael folded first, his tired green eyes dropping with a hint of guilt.“Look, Don, I . . . Just . . . This seems like it could be a wild goose chase. A really . . . disappointin’ one. Don’t get your hopes up, bro.”“I don’t have ‘hopes’ anymore, Raphael,” Donnie droned at his most patronising, “I have a database of logically-deduced projected outcomes that refreshes itself every five milliseconds.”“Don’t gimme the robot crap. I know how much you care about her. You talk about her all the time!”Of course he talked about her. He had auto-scheduled tasks in his damned code for it. It was what Donatello would do , so his programming told him to do it. But he couldn’t explain that to Raphael, couldn’t burden his brother with existential crises beyond his technical understanding. Couldn’t tell him how thoughts and memories of April were like a virus his system couldn’t shake. Couldn’t confess to spending some of his darkest thought cycles trying to figure out just how much of her he could purge from his own code without leaving an irreparable gaping hole in everything that was Donatello.“Yeah,” he allowed instead. “Yeah, I do. So, try and understand, Raph. It doesn’t matter how low the odds are, I can’t . . . ”Raphael finished the sentence for him with a leaden voice. “ . . . You can’t walk away from this.”
root >> /.dmgdiag.conf -p -f -c
>> dmgdiag > Executing diagnostics check (combat readiness only)
=============================
#Critical Errors
=============================
External . . . OK
Internal . . . OK
No critical errors found
=============================
#Warnings
=============================
Exoskeletal damage classification: superficial
Right shoulder mobility at 76.18%
Operational effectiveness above minimum threshold. Commencing reboot . . .
Scanning area . . . Threat level below minimum threshold
Deactivating defence mode
His head emerges first, inch by inch from his protective carapace. It doesn’t get very far before it clinks against a hard surface, though far enough for his visor to clear the rim of his plastron. Visuals flare into life, painting for him a view of . . . well, not much. Mostly the glare of his own accents reflecting back at him from the layer of broken crystal debris that seems to have buried him.Donatello’s HUD layers over the display, and one bouncing alert in particular demands his attention - an incoming communication signal, unfailingly persistent. Thirty-eight minutes since their last conversation, a timer somewhere tells him. Oh boy.His limbs extending - and the shoulder that must have taken the brunt of the blast complaining squeakily as they do so - he gingerly begins to push himself free from his combustible surroundings. The explosion probably saved him, in the end. The storm would have ripped him apart without the cover of its detritus. Beyond, the blast and the tempest have torn through the immediate walls of the labyrinth like a pair of quarrelling lovers, leaving a shard-littered clearing behind in their wake.He can’t tell how far he was thrown; the landscape of crystal walls is too homogeneous for clear pattern matching to his last known location, even if the storm hadn’t swept half of it away. All his careful tracking and navigation measures from before are useless data now.But at least the labyrinth is eerily still again, just the occasional delicate tinkle of broken crystal chiming through the broken walls.He’s putting it off, though.“Oh, hey, Raph.” There is a residual crackle in his voice as he answers.“WHERE - THE HELL - HAVE YOU - BEEN ?!”His brother’s voice is ragged, disrupted by the effort of heaving huge, struggling breaths. Donnie sinks back into the hollow he’s made of his bed of ravaged crystal with a crunch, discordant internal alarms rising to take the place of a skipped heartbeat, a lurching stomach.“Raph . . . You idiot , tell me you’re not anywhere near this Kraang hellscape!”The only sound coming across the line is Raph’s hacksaw breathing. Then, a choking sound that has nothing to do with suffocation.“I . . . I couldn’t,” he gasps. “I tried but I couldn’t get close. I couldn’t get to you. I couldn’t get to you.” His words are wretchedly distressed, so lacerated by recent panic that Donnie defensively shrinks back into himself. Antennae in their lowest position, guilt protocols all fully engaged.“I’m okay, Raph. Take it easy, big guy. I’m okay. Are you a safe distance away?”He is, and he clearly hates it. Donnie talks him through loading up his rebreather with the most appropriate cartridge from his limited medical stocks on the Shellraiser - fortunately (or unfortunately), toxic fumes are something of a regular wasteland hazard. The materials needed for something to combat this density of Kraang atmosphere are no longer readily available in sufficient quantities, but some of his chemical mixes will help.They don’t speak for a while, then, connected but silent aside from Raph’s muted wheezing. Donnie is concerned, though pure scientific logic tells him his brother must have gotten clear of the terraformed air before it became lethal. But how far has he pushed himself? The wheezing is becoming a little less grating over time, but can there be any permanent damage? Donnie finds himself nervously consulting related medical databanks. There isn’t exactly a lot of formal literature on Dimension X and its biological horrorshows -“Just . . . listen, bro. You’re all I got out here.” Despite the lingering rough edge to his voice, Raphael says that in tones far too soft for the lantern jaw of an old giant turtle. “If we gotta die, I want us to go down kicking shell together - not like this, man.”Occasionally, when darker thought processes steal priority from the rest, Donnie wonders if his relationship with Raph is a little too one-sided for his pride. As a largely self-sufficient, unaging genius machine with no need for food or water, his value to any scavenger in the wasteland is not lost on him. Without him, Raph wouldn’t have most of the tech on board the Shellraiser. Relation or no, as far as survival goes, Raphael needs Donnie a lot more than Donnie needs him.And not least of all because he is Raph’s walking, talking aide de memoire , his sole connection to his past identity, a heavy dependency that he cannot shake. Everything Raph knows about himself and his family has been explained to him by Donatello - and sure, some things seem to stick, over time and with enough repetition. A blank look will abruptly be replaced by the gleam of recollection as something rises through whatever mutagen murk has gripped his mind to become a remembered experience instead of a story I know. Outside of those flashes of encouragement, sometimes Don feels it is Raphael who is the robot, going through the motions with the identity that he programmed in for him. Then there are these sudden moments of raw, coarse sincerity that always catch him by surprise, his brother’s shell unexpectedly softening with age - for all that he’s the size of a small tank now and five times as ugly. And they make Donnie hate himself for even entertaining the cold logic, sending him into wild spirals of self-doubt.Would the organic Donatello ever think that way? Would the original ever reduce the value of a brother down to how much he needed him, even in idle thought?And he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. There is no benchmark anymore.“Nobody’s dying, Raph.” It’s blunter than he’d like, but Donnie’s processors have churned over possible responses for a full two seconds, and none of them have been particularly satisfactory.“Yeah? You may be tough but you ain’t invincible, so do me a favour and watch your six.”A weak, strangled half-laugh escapes him. “How is it you forgot everything important but remembered cheesy Hollywood military one-liners?”Deep chuckles rasp across the line. “Guess my brain just held onto the essentials.”“Yeah, well . . .” Donnie’s neck contracts, pulling his head a little closer to his shoulders. “I hear ya, okay? I hear ya.”“Good. ‘Cause I -”“Wait.”Movement. A pinging sensor tells him so. He casts around but can’t catch a visual. There’s nothing, nothing . . .Until he looks up.“Raph, I’ll call you back.” Donnie cuts the connection without waiting for a reply, muting his external output entirely. His accent lights go, too, dimming to nothing. Cosmetic motion protocols - driving gesture and animation that serves no purpose but to make him more acceptable, more Donatello to organics - are temporarily disabled. He becomes a still, lifeless lump of metal amidst the debris.Just in time for her shadow to sweep right over him.Vestigial code tells him to shudder. What passes for air in this alien oasis ripples several feet above his head, marking her slow, drifting descent to the clearing - and it is a drift, for as she falls into his line of sight he realises she is floating effortlessly on a wave of her own apparent willpower. Sharp, prismatic colour dances across crystal that seems to have no place embedded in the softer pink of human flesh.The space around her distorts, refracts, can barely contain her.A witch, they call her. Shiva , he substitutes. The image match blares at him. A database supplies a slew of images, plucked from an archive of the divine and the terrifying, sourced from an internet search, perhaps, or a religious text that once crossed his lab desk. It’s invalid, of course. Divinity was a concept drafted by humans, only invented to explain things their science could yet not, and now never will.Invalid. Invalid. But Donnie can’t dismiss the suggestion and it seeps deeply into the context of his observations, colouring his every reading of the entity that lands at the edge of the broken clearing.Toes, balls of feet, bare heels connecting feather-light and glissando to the ground as though gravity is a problem for mere mortals.Infinitely patient and ethereal in poise.Silent, austere, unapproachable.
Many-limbed.
Not entirely true, that last one. But how else to interpret that array of slender, pink appendages that radiate out from the base of her skull, serpentine and alive and each one of six crackling with readings that threaten to blow his sensors?And yet her hands, her arms, are human. He sees them clearly as she raises them in an idle arc above her head, a masterfully graceful conductor. In the face of that silent physical command, the shattered crystal wall before her can do nothing but grow , an upsurge of liquid crystal that freezes jaggedly solid the moment it reaches its prior giddy heights.Inspecting the storm damage? Fixing it? Donnie’s bank of theories refreshes, instantly dismissing some half dozen environmental anomalies that could have been responsible for the existence of the Sharding Wastes.Because it is undeniably hers. She built it - no, terraformed it. The Wastes are her domain and all of its danger is her doing. Everything from the impenetrable atmosphere to the disorienting labyrinth most mutants would never even reach.She turns to another broken wall but he still can’t see her face. The unresolved datapoint burns in him like acid, eating away at his machine patience.He has to know.He has to know.All subdued systems blaze into life and Donatello launches out of cover, magenta screaming from every exoskeletal light. He stands tall atop a mound of shattered crystal, cranks up his volume to maximum and blasts out a single word:“APRIL!”Her back arches inwards. The tentacles shiver once, then snap as one to point in his direction, the glowing cyan eyelets in their tips glaring at him. What senses proliferate through those alien appendages, he cannot fathom, but it isn’t until the resonating echoes of the name dissipate to the furthest reaches of the labyrinth that the rest of her follows their lead.When she turns it is an unnatural movement, an instant one-eighty full-body wrench that brings her around to face him and simultaneously propels her a threatening three feet into the air. Donatello can finally see her face, and . . .It is not April. Not really.The freckles. The scalp blossoming with red hair. Those large expressive eyes and button nose. All these things, these images that have spammed his processors daily since inception - as well as the sheer coincidence of circumstance - tell him that she must have been April, once.Little else does. With a sense of scientific detachment he reads in the green hue of her sclera, so luminous they almost hide the aggressive black slits of her pupils. A quivering comb of Kraang antennae form a living mohawk atop her head. Beneath the . . . changes, she has barely aged a day, but the icy hostility in her face renders her a thousand years ancient.“April?” Donnie tries again. There is less confidence this time. Expected outcomes are nervously calculating, recalculating in an endless loop - and yet, her eyes widen, just a little, when he speaks. “Come on . . . It has to be you!”There is a long, dragging moment of non-response; she simply hangs in mid-air, rigidly tense and bristling. A yawning, wounding chasm of a theory begins to unfold in Donatello as the seconds tick away; perhaps she is simply too far gone, everything that was April eroded away, dragging her beyond any attempts at human communication. Beyond human.But then her head bows slightly, her jaw working thickly and uncomfortably around the effort of constructing words.“What. Is this.”It’s something. He scrapes the dense, grating rust off the broken words, navigates the uneven spacing, the alien sibilance and jarring tones, and there, glistening underneath it all, he strikes gold - a pure waveform that aligns perfectly with his equally pristine memories of the voice of April O’Neil.Like dowsing rods finding water, his antennae leap to excitable attention. “I can’t believe it.” Donnie chokes out a laugh, gazing up at her with his visor glowing in robotic wonder. “It’s really you! You . . . survived!”A goose chase, Raph had called it. A goose chase. Well, he has found the damned golden goose. Questions about April that have clogged his code and hammered his processors for decades are flagged as resolved and begin to blip away one by one, clearing a floodplain of beautifully free, unhindered memory. He knows how he would describe it if he were still organic; relief , deep and liberating.He takes a step toward her - and then flinches two steps back, because in a flurry of rippling tendrils her sinuous form is suddenly hovering two feet away from him and nothing about it can be mistaken for a friendly advance.“What. Is. This?”His hands creep up automatically in the face of this bristling mass of angry perplexion, palms outward, the universal sign of ‘please don’t kill me’.“April . . . I know this is gonna come as a shock, but it’s me! Do you . . . remember?”Her head rears back, lustrous eyes enlarging once again as she takes in the sound of his voice.“ . . . Donatello.”Sweet, intoxifying validation. It’s almost enough to make him drop his guard, but there’s still no warmth in that wrathful face, and her gaze is not just taking in his unfamiliar robot form; Donnie watches those inhuman pupils dart left to right, hunting around the circumference of the clearing. It take an embarrassing three attempts, albeit all processed in under a millisecond, for an interpretative subroutine to latch onto what she’s looking for, and the answer carries a not entirely unexpected sting. Me. She’s looking for me.“Oh, uh . . . no, April.” Donnie waves his hands a little, stilling them immediately when it looks like she might bite them off. “I’m not being controlled. There’s nobody else nearby. I-I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m right here. In this body. This is all of me.”Her nostrils flare. A coordinated trembling of her drifting tentacles betrays every misgiving.“Impossible,” she hisses.“Yeah, I know it seems that way! It’s a kinda long story. But-I’ll-keep-it-short!” Donnie promises hastily at the impatient tension manifesting in her suspended figure. “My organic body was destroyed when the bomb went off. But I transferred my mind, my consciousness, into this robot body and -”“Donatello’s consciousness?”She is ascending by inches, both up and away from him, the increasing distance between them underscored by the uncompromising edges of her hard expression. Her hands sketch an odd, tactile gesture directed at him, and whatever its purpose it leaves her patently unsatisfied, burning a frown ever-deeper into her face.“Where is Donatello’s soul?”No, no no . . . Not here. Not from her. Summoned from his darkest depths, old overwrought lines of enquiry flare open, stacks upon stacks of them slamming into his processor queue. Doubts, he would call them if he was alive, which scientifically he was not , but the answers they spit at him are agonisingly technical, doing nothing to resolve the nuance of April’s question.There’s no scientific evidence that souls exist, no hypothesis for him to explore, nothing viable to test, and yet that unanswered question remains an encompassing black hole in his codebase, carefully skirted, dodged and bypassed in his day-to-day operations but never truly gone .In principle, he knows he is just a mind. No, not even a mind - an imprint of a mind at its time of death, its owner desperately reaching into the only outlet for self-preservation it had. But is everything that has built on top of that imprint truly the original Donatello? Does it have . . . his soul?Raph has never asked, god bless him but he’s never asked, and Donnie is both grateful for and envious of that clueless indifference. Perhaps he’s just afraid of the answer, but the likelihood is that the enormous existential crisis that weighs infinitely on his sibling’s metallic shoulders never even crosses Raphael’s mind. He has never, not once, questioned what Donatello is or how he works - and Donatello has never, not once, thanked him as excessively as he should for that sanity-sparing concession; in the early years his processors hadn’t needed much prompting to get caught in a loop, crunching the numbers on the matter of what he was , endlessly cycling, spawning and feeding an anxiety that he masked behind simulations of his old sardonic humour.Or is the anxiety a simulation, too? The sadness when he remembers what they’ve lost? The kinship he still feels with his brother? Can any of it be described as ‘real’? Can a being without a soul truly feel anything?He has seized up. It takes every emergency system interrupt he has to break free before he can condemn himself with his own silence.“I am Donatello!” he forces out. “Please, you gotta trust me. April -”But it’s too late. He’s already lost her. Emotion finally touches that alien face, and it is raw, corrupting fury.“ April ,” she snarls, “was a lie. You are a lie.”“No, no . . . Listen -”“There is no mind in you. You are EMPTY.”Temperature is nothing but a metric to him, but something inside still becomes brittle and cold.He should not be surprised. He is rarely surprised anymore. April has always been a sensitive, an empathic reader of minds and hearts. This was a solid fact in his databanks - he knew this, he knew this and yet somehow, in the myriad code-driven predictions for how this encounter might go if it even happened at all, Donatello had not once considered that she would reach inside him, find nothing but soldering and circuitry, and casually rip away the foundations of his sentience.“IMPOSTER.” Loathing of ancient depths and terrible density drips from the word. “You are not him. YOU ARE NOT HIM !”The last word is a splitting scream, shrill and distorted and ripping out of a jaw that has dropped beyond any natural hinge to unsheath the rows of needle teeth within.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“Donnie?”He glanced up from the fractured laptop screen revolving slowly between his hands, and his neck immediately punished him for his long hours of painstaking work with a stiff and painful click. Donatello muffled his squawk of discomfort, though; it was trivial compared to what his visitor would be bringing with her.“Hey, April,” he ventured quietly. “You okay?”April shrugged, slipping haphazardly onto a chair next him. The kitchen table was strewn with wires, circuit-boards and other components from his sadly deceased laptop, but she cleared a space with a blunt sweep of her defensively folded arms and then firmly planted her face in them.“Mmm. Take that as a no,” he acknowledged softly, and reached over to give her shoulder a squeeze.Her head rolled sideways, exposing one incredibly tired blue eye.“Can you fix it?”Infinitely more solid ground. Donatello inhaled deeply and expelled a dramatic breath. “I doubt it. The, uh . . . monster, she really did a number on it. At this rate, I’m just gonna salvage it for parts.”They sank into a silence punctuated only by the clickety-click of Donnie’s tools. The farmhouse was abnormally quiet for one populated by his three rowdy brothers and one Casey Jones; of course, if they felt anything like he did after being ingested by some slime-filled Kraangified monstrosity, they were probably wrangling some well-earned downtime. As he should be . . . and so should April.Especially April.“Donnie.” She lifted her head, staring at some fixed point near the sink.“Mmm?”“What was it all for?”He lowered the screwdriver, his gaze warm but nonetheless a little nervous. After all, despite the distinct lack of an accusatory bite in that very broad question, his brain immediately attempted to crucify on him every mistake he’d ever made in April’s presence - and, oh boy, the list was a long one. “Ah. Might need you to be a little more specific?”April grimaced, sucking in a harsh breath, her unfocused eyes still glued to the kitchen units.“The Kraang turned my entire family into one big science experiment. But all experiments have a point. So what was it all for?”Donatello sighed wistfully, the puff of air whistling through the gap in his teeth. “I . . . don’t know that. At least, not yet. I’m sorry, April. There’s no data from the ship about you, or your dad. Just . . . stuff about your mom.”April nodded; of course, she knew that already. A young woman whose only real claim to riches was a lifetime’s wealth of disappointment.“You said she was some kind of infiltration experiment,” she persisted, and Donnie winced. It would have been nice if, for once , he hadn’t let the fascinating science propel words out of his mouth unchecked.“Yeah, I . . . I mean, the general direction of their experiments is clear enough. They were splicing Kraang and earthbound DNA, maybe trying to find biological compromises between organisms from our planet - our dimension - and those from Dimension X. And find ways to walk among us without people freaking out at their ugly pink bubblegum faces, I guess.” Sheepishly he rolled his shoulders, staring very intently at the tip of his screwdriver. “I think they must have abandoned that strategy, though. They seem to have gone the mechanical route instead, what with the mass-produced Men in Black exoskeletons and, um . . .”“Irma.” The corner of her mouth tweaked, an utterly frosty smile. “But the not-Mom-thing had Mom’s memories?”“Well . . . a kinda cherrypicked highlight-reel of ‘em, at least.“ He paused to study her, brow furrowed with concern. Her thousand-yard stare had yet to swing in his direction. “The technology was still experimental, but they took some kind of basic imprint of your mother’s mind and sourced them from there.”His pragmatic side was fascinated by that. He was pretty sure you could overcome the experiment’s shortcomings if you switched from biological to digital storage and transference, operating on the principle that even your synaptic signals were basically just data -“Did it think it was my Mom?”Donatello swallowed. On fragile ground to begin with, the conversation had suddenly veered into a field of closely-packed landmines. “Can’t say for sure, April.”“No? ‘Cause I can.” She blinked, seemingly for the first time in an age, and finally shot her deadpan stare right at him. “It thought it was something like my mother. And maybe it was all twisted up and tangled with Kraang intentions - whatever they were - but its instincts were driven by her memories. It wanted me with her. All it shrieked at me about in those last moments of the fight,” she all but spat, “was family.”“April . . . I’m sorry . . .”The noise that came out of her was sheer wretched, exhausted frustration. “I need to know, Don! There must have been something else in the data! What was the point? What’s their endgame? Was the not-Mom always meant to be dangerous? A perfect spy to begin with, some kind of . . . biological weapon later?”She jerked herself up from the table, feverishly laying out the pieces for him in a ragged voice - as if he couldn’t already see the nauseating trail leading to her obvious conclusion, no matter how much he tried not to. “It had Mom’s memories and thought it was Mom. It had both Mom’s and Kraang DNA. If it was an ‘early’ experiment, then . . .” April gritted her teeth, her eyes awash with such miserable appeal that his heart ached for her. “Look, Don, my hybrid DNA is just like hers. And I think I’m me, but what if I’m wrong?”The laugh trembled out of her. “What exactly stops me from being the deceptively stable version 2.0?”
Three subroutines spit out a dozen potential ways in which he might succeed in killing her - and then his glorious, blessed morality matrix kicks in and slams down an override. It is, in many ways, Donatello’s greatest piece of work; a finely-tuned neural mesh of Jiminy Cricket wisdom plotted over the contours of his memories, his past decisions, his every emotional and physical response available for recall.Sometimes it is the only thing that makes him feel sentient. Without it he wouldn’t be screaming at the modules of his own code that April’s death is an unacceptable outcome, so try harder you little bastards.So the parameters shift. Defence, suppression and coercion become the priority; capture seems unlikely and wounding can’t be critical or permanent, so it climbs toward the rank of ‘last resort’. As he watches the variable values and corresponding strategies adjust, he also watches the calculated odds of success plummet through the floor.After all, he’s battling a goddess.April crackles with cyan incandescence against the garish broken sky, ascendant in all her idle murderous grace. The tentacles that extend from her skull array commandingly around her figure. Dark swathes of teal and violet crystal coat her torso like otherworldly armour and crawl in strange trajectories along her human limbs. Her face is stony and empty once more, but for the divine rage that bleeds from her huge, glowing eyes. Beautiful. The stray thought seizes hold of him and won’t let go.If she is calm, deified wrath personified, then the clearing itself has become the manifestation of her fury. A turbulent wind boils all around Donatello, the ground and its litter of crystal debris rattling underfoot with the tremors of her escaping psionics. He has already thrown up his arms in tentative defence against the scrape and skitter of loose shards whipped into a frenzy by her torrent of power.He ejects the two halves of his bo staff from his hollow palms and grips the electrified rods with grim determination.“April!” he yells up over the intensifying gale. “I didn’t come all this way to fight you!”Even at the distance between them he can’t miss the disdainful narrowing of her eyes.“Then don’t.”Casually, she lifts a hand - and the ground at his feet erupts with jagged crystal spears twice his height.But his feet aren’t there. Donatello has already sprung out of harm’s way, and the accuracy of her opening gambit tells him he needs to keep moving. If he was organic, it would be over already. He remembers the gecko’s stories; April’s terraforming prowess applies to more than non-sentient life.Then again, if he was organic, she wouldn’t be trying to kill him at all.“You don’t need to do this!” Donnie keeps up the barrage of appeal, reaping the benefits of not needing to pause for breath as he weaves his way untiringly through her line of fire. “Just stop! We can talk!”And he has been aching to talk to her for 18,987 days, 22 hours and 18 minutes. Just one conversation, a simple exchange of sentences, the sound of a single word in her voice -“No.”Any other single word in her voice.Buffeting winds with a crystal bite - April’s very own mini-razorstorm - threaten his stability with every jarring step, but Donatello somehow manages to keep inches ahead of her onslaught. The crack and crunch of volatile crystal growth bursting at his heels keeps him going.It’s the same crystal she wears. “Wears”, because a substream of low-priority queries has been analysing the distribution of it on her body and he is 88.63% certain it’s not just a side effect of her latent mutation.Combustible armour. Not something a half-Kraang terraforming bioweapon could make by accident. Not something an incredibly isolated lonely half-human in distress wouldn’t wear on purpose, either.“April!” For all Donatello’s lack of the appropriate organ, his plea sounds desperately heartfelt.Perhaps her patience isn’t as infinite as it appears, or the sound of her name coming from his modulated Donatello voice is too offensive to her, but her sudden shriek of frustration ripples across the clearing on a wave of alien subsonics. The wave of terraformation ceases its pursuit of him as she changes strategy - she thrashes her hands out to her sides and, as though bound by invisible threads, loose chunks of crystal heave up into the air to begin a threatening orbit around her suspended figure.Donnie takes his first opportunity to skid to a halt and whirl to face her. His cosmetic animations are still active, limbs and joints moving in a rhythmic sequence that suggest laboured breathing. His energy reserves have eight hours of intense activity left in them, though. He can do this all day.He will do this all day, if that’s what it takes.“Donatello wouldn’t give up on you, April! And I hate to break it to ya, but I’m not about to do anything different.”Her face spasms with indignation, fingers twitching briefly into claws, and with a leisurely flick of a wrist she sends the first toddler-sized shard hurtling right at him.The two halves of his bo staff snap together just in time for him to land a strike against the incoming missile, the angle of his swing calculated exactly to send it careening off to the edge of the clearing. He hears the violent crack as it hits the ground, and spins away to put his shell between him and the hot fuschia explosion that belches out of its impact crater. It’s too far away to reach him, but a rain of glittering debris clatters down across his exoskeleton.Then he’s running, because April is flinging another at him. And another, in quick succession. He dodges the first and by some miracle it doesn’t fracture when it lands three feet behind him; the second clips the guard of his weakened shoulder joint with the force of a sledgehammer and knocks him considerably off course. Good fortune, as it turns out, when that means he isn’t directly in the path of the third shard, which would otherwise have impaled him right through the chestplate.Unfortunately, a series of spidery cracks branch through it the second it slams into the ground behind him. The wave of pressure from its explosion is a giant fist in his back. He’s thrown forward, coming down hard on hands and knees amidst a sea of glittering crystal fragments.Damage report summaries ambush him - nothing critical, though that dodgy shoulder has taken a significant dent to its mobility percentage. Raph’s incoming signal is bouncing frenetically in the corner of his HUD and has been for a while. There is a related priority conflict waiting for him to resolve, too.
Where does ‘make it back to your brother in one piece’ rank against ‘don’t kill April’?
He dismisses it. He’ll figure it out later.“Once, you asked me what you were for!” he cries out, scrambling upright before she can take advantage of his stationary position and find some other way to murder him. “What your DNA said you would become! Do you remember what I told you, April?”Each time he says the name, her face contorts with such livid outrage that it threatens to become a singularity.So he keeps saying it. Of course. “I said it didn’t matter, April! I said you would be whatever you wanted to be, April ! I said -” and he reels, a spiteful fragment of crystal the size of a fist thumping against the side of his head, another near-miss scoring a gash across his chestplate that is half an inch deep. But he won’t be stopped. He won’t be stopped . “ - I said you were perfect, April !”The wind is picking up. A thousand tiny splinters of flying crystal batter his body, turn his field of vision into a refractive mess. She is almost a silhouette now, only her brilliant eyes glaring like beacons of bottomless hatred.“But is this it? All you are, after all? Just another Kraang weapon?” Even at his maximum volume each word barely makes it out of his speakers before the maelstrom rips it away into oblivion. He’s almost doubled over against the tearing winds and their razor-edged detritus. “‘Cause I gotta tell ya: you’re the lousiest damn Kraang weapon I ever saw! You’ve had decades to terraform this planet for the Kraang, but you didn’t do it ! You hid yourself away, didn’t you! Because you’re not one of them, you never were! You are April O’Ne -”Sensors register sudden external pressure with no apparent cause - and then he is jerked up into the air by invisible hands. His bo staff flies out of his grip and his head snaps back with the force of the lift. Donnie finds himself dangling impotently in the eye of the storm, and her furious face hovers just inches from his visor.She is trembling and the world seems unable to do anything but tremble with her, this force of un-nature so blisteringly powerful that he might as well be facing down an alien sun.“You are the weapon. YOU . All I wanted was to be LEFT ALONE !” The human words are barely audible anymore beneath the alien harmonics that distort her voice - but still, when the raw waveforms run through his analysers he hears the years of agony and loss coursing through them. “They sent you here to punish me. You are not him. Just a machine.” Her eyes shrink to hateful slits. “A Kraang machine.”She doesn’t give him any time to object to that accusation. Her fingertips form a pincer cage over the painted star on his chestplate - her star - and deep in the cavity beneath it, the Kraang power cell that is his very beating heart resonates at her distant touch. His surge protection system can barely cope with the sudden fluctuating current that rends its way from the power supply.“Ap-p-pril!” The audio stutters spasmodically out of him. “Stz-stzzt-stop!”“WHY ?” Her question is flat and uncompromising as concrete. “You’re not real. You’re not him! Do you even feel pain, ‘Donatello’?”He doesn’t. Not really. But when she squeezes his crystal heart and sends a jolt of violent energy coursing through his exoskeleton, hot enough to dredge vapour from the joints, he knows he is hurt because a dozen critical errors tell him so.Those, in turn, trigger an appropriate behavioural response.He screams.It judders and ruptures through faltering audio output, but there is little disguising the raw sound. A perfect synthesis of his organic voice, pure and realistic as if it had come from his long-disintegrated mouth. He doesn’t know how long he spent fine-tuning it, sampling recorded audio, listening and relistening and tweaking and adjusting, trying to capture not just the core sound but the emotions, the inflections that made his pattern of speech so very Donatello. But Raph’s seal of approval stands as reliably as his memory, and who the hell doesn’t feel a little weirded out hearing their own voice played back to them? He has never quite been sure that he nailed it.Until now.The next sensory input he registers is the crunch of impact with the ground - and an upside-down glimpse of April’s horrified face after she drops him, frightened as a child. He watches her recoil through his complaining and stuttering visuals, curling in on herself like a dying spider.The palpable distress in her expression is the closest to human she’s been since he found her.“Cruel,” he hears her whisper, because those feral winds have dropped to nothing. Aside from the clink of settling crystal detritus the clearing grows still and silent, and April sinks despairingly low to the ground in the middle of it all, deflated of all zeal. Donnie drags himself up into a sitting position, every abused servo whining against the effort.“You can’t be him.” He braces himself for disappointment, but there’s no anger left in her - just wretched, exhausted denial. She hunches over with a shuddering breath. “You can’t have been out there all this time ! ”He cannot measure the raw, aching loneliness in that cry.Donatello climbs gingerly to his feet, mechanisms groaning for each inch of movement he achieves. Every fragment of code that isn’t an internal damage alert tells him to run. Instead, he takes a cautious step towards her. Another, and another, until he’s standing directly in front of her and still hasn’t been destroyed on the spot. So he lifts his arms and folds her gently into an embrace.If he’s reading everything right, there is a 68.76% probability that he is about to be ripped into his separate components. But he gets to watch the statistics fall the longer April remains unmoving in his arms. After a while, her fingertips creep up his jagged carapace until her hands rest flat on his shoulders, high enough to pull him tightly against her with a powerful squeeze.He is still taller, even with April drifting a listless inch off the ground. It’s just the right height for her forehead, when it droops forward, to touch his battered chestplate.All other queries and processing strands fall to silence, and there is nothing for Donatello but that pulse of mutual contact between them. His mind is awash with moments that carry the touch and feel of this one - post-battle-victory hugs, I’m-sorry-about-your-Dad/Mom/best-friend hugs, I’m-having-a-bad-day-because-I-got-abducted-by-aliens hugs, ignore-your-brothers-they-are-jerks hugs, don’t-worry-you’ll-figure-it-out-Dee hugs. A veritable swarm of sensory and emotional memories hum away like physical vibrations inside him.But he can’t ignore the dissonance, either. The soft curves of April’s shoulders are marred by hard, sharp crystal edges that were never there before. Her strange comb of sensitive antennae quivers in his peripheral vision as his jaw alights gently on the top of her head. Sensors tell him she is cool to the touch . . . and if she weren’t, he wouldn’t be able to really feel it, would he?Because he is not Donatello. Not really. Like everything else in this twisted wasteland he is nothing but a simulacrum of something that no longer is. April tentatively explores the hard metal beneath her hands, peers with uncertainty into his expressionless face. The only warmth in his eyes generates from a violet strip of light and he cannot smile, not anymore.She knows. She studies the very depths of him and she knows, and she pulls away, smiling a terribly sad smile.“You are not Donatello,” she says again, and although he flinches, this time the words aren’t designed to hurt. “But I’m not April O’Neil. We are neither of us what we were.”She begins to draw back, draw up , ascending on the most mournful breath ever inhaled, and Donnie feels the keen sting of loss before she has even left him. The terrible violence is gone from her but in its place is a resigned, melancholy serenity so powerfully ethereal he fears she may simply drift up to the heavens and disperse, all mortal matter and thought evaporating from her.He can’t let go. His hands glide down her shoulders and slender arms, bump over crystal protrusions at her elbows. When his own arms are at full extension he almost loses her at the wrists - but he seizes her hands and squeezes before they can fully slip out of his grasp.“Does it matter?” he blurts out desperately.She stops. Her eyes slide blankly from his entrapment of her fingertips to the earnest thrust of his head.“I mean . . .” His laugh is broken, dark and wounded, and words tumble out of him in a bitter rush. “What kinda standard are we trying to live up to, here? What is a person, anyway? The way I see it, they’re just the sum of all their experience. Every decision they ever made, every emotion they ever felt, every sight they ever saw, everything they were ever told. And it builds up, day to day, moment to moment, until the person they were even one second ago isn’t the person they are now. There was never a single Donatello, April. And when my body died, all that experience transferred to this one and I just . . . kept going .”He lowers his head, fumbling through the concepts even as he generates them. There’s nothing new here, nothing that decades of agonised consideration haven’t already stowed away somewhere in reams of data on those burning existential questions - but somehow, April’s presence grounds it all in meaningful context and turns those logical leaps and stretches into merely philosophical ones.“I kept going. Through everything we lost, everything the bomb burned away or ruined beyond all repair, I kept going. And . . . you know what?”He meets her gaze, resolute and angry. “If I wasn’t Donatello, it would have been a hell of a lot easier. If I didn’t have to drag all the baggage of Donatello’s life with me every step of the way, it would have been liberating. But I did it. I did it, and if I have to carry that burden then I’m gonna carry his damn name, too! Nobody has earned the right to be Donatello more than me!”Her expression softens by degrees throughout his tirade, her eyes fixed so raptly upon him that they could be the very centre of his world.“And you . . .” Donnie’s grip on her hands tightens. “You never stopped being April. She wasn’t a lie. She was real, is real. She’s right here and I can’t . . .” His antennae sink with a mechanical whir that sounds a little like a puppy-dog whine. “I can’t lose her twice. Please, don’t make me lose her twice.”She is still staring. In her eyes is something hungry, desperate. Hopeful. He realises he is casting her a lifeline.A way out.Donnie doesn’t quite have her yet, though. The gossamer thread of connection between them is so fragile it could snap at any moment, and he urgently presses the offensive. “Look, April. I know you built this place to hide away from the world - and it worked! No mutant out there could even get close.” His visor gleams. “But I’m not a mutant anymore. Being the way I am now is the only thing that got me here in one piece. Nobody else could have done it. If you really believe in souls . . . maybe you can believe in fate?”Her feet touch the floor. His heart touches the heavens.“Cheesy,” she says, with a ghost of a smile.“Yeah, maybe a little bit,” he chuckles weakly.But the ghost is fleeting. April slowly withdraws her fingers from his loosening grip. “I wasn’t in control, at first,” she warns him, without looking away. “I’ve done things. Hurt people.” There’s no guilt in her, not after so long; just frank admission and the weary remnants of remorse.“Everybody’s hurt people in the wasteland,” Donnie shrugs, albeit lopsidedly because his shoulder is busted all to hell. “That’s the way the wasteland works. You think we haven’t had to do things we regret just to survive out here?”She blinks up at him, the ridge of pink spines on her head rippling in a curious wave of surprise - and silent query.“Hey, that’s right!” Donatello raises a sheepish hand to the back of his neck for the omission. “I might just have a little more incentive for ya.”The second he cracks open the comm line his brother’s gravelly voice blasts from his speakers, sending all of April’s tentacles up like startled rattlesnakes.“What did we just talk about, Donnie?! What’s with the radio silence? What was all that commotion over there? Don’t think I didn’t see it! I swear, when you get back here I’m gonna-”“Raphael?” April seizes Donnie’s head in both hands and yells into it like a telephone receiver, almost yanking him off his feet in the process. He thinks about telling her it doesn’t work that way . . . but her face is right next to his and that doesn’t particularly strike him as being a situation that needs resolving.“What the . . . Don?”“Hey, Raph,” Donnie chirps. “I found April.”“ . . . huh .”Raphael, master of understatement. April is absorbing this newest revelation with attentive fascination, her breathing soft against Donnie’s ‘ear’. “You’re still . . .”“Alive?” Raph finishes for her with a rusty laugh. “Yeah, I guess I’m still here, somehow.”“You might need a wide-angled viewing lens to see all of him at once, though.” Donnie cannot, in conscience, let the moment pass by without the appropriate level of brotherly sniping.“Hey, shaddup! But, uh . . .” The old turtle clears his throat. “I mean . . . I ain’t gonna lie, sister. There are a lot of holes in my memory and I don’t . . . really remember you too good.”Donnie quickly scans her face, but April’s only visible reaction is a disappointed puff of breath.“But I know Donnie does,” Raph continues. “He still talks about you a lot. And the second he caught wind of a rumour of a myth of a legend that you might be here? There was no stopping him.”That does make her eyes brighten a little - quite literally, given her current mutation.“Plus, things come back to me, sometimes. But I gotta be near ‘em. I gotta see ‘em and feel ‘em or they don’t become real. I don’t know what you’ve been through but if Donnie says you’re one of us, there’s a place on the Shellraiser for ya. It ain’t much, but it’s home.”“Home.” The echoed word is barely a breath, so quiet that Donnie isn’t sure his microphone will have caught it. April’s fingers slip away from his metallic head and she takes an almost imperceptible step backwards. Various states of social alarm flutter through his processors.“We’re heading back to you now, Raph,” he says quickly.“All right. Just don’t expect a fancy welcome - we’re short on red carpet. Watch yourselves out there.”Communication ends with a click. Donnie turns to her, very slowly; a sudden move seems like all it will take to rip this fledgling accord apart.“We’re heading back. Because you are coming with me, right, April?”She stares down with those intense slitted eyes at the palms of her hands. “Can this . . . really work?” Her words are a whisper, not so much a question, he quickly realises, but a plea. He can barely reconcile the shaken vulnerability in her shrinking frame with the entity that, just five minutes ago, was unrepentantly trying to kill him.“Of course it can!” he rebuffs softly, but even taking his hands back to her shoulders doesn’t dispel the misery etched into her face.“Everything is so different now.““I admit, we’re all a little different - just wait until you see Raph - but, April . . .” Donnie pauses, sinking his head a little to meet her eyes. “It’s not all bad. When I’m not having a depressing existential crisis, sometimes I really like being this way. It can be . . . awesome. My mind was sharp before, but now?” He can’t - and doesn’t want to - keep the genuine enthusiasm from his voice. “The sheer speed of thought, the scale of the calculations - concurrent calculations - it’s capable of in a fraction of the time? Perfect memory storage and retrieval? No degradation over time that I can’t mitigate with upgrades and replacement parts? My brain’s running at peak efficiency!”She crumples inward then, leaning heavily against his hands, and Donatello’s antennae swivel up in alarm. April grates out a harsh sound, choked, awkward, almost unnatural - until he recognises it for what it is.Laughter.It takes her a good minute to dredge up the word she wants from her ancient, disused vocabulary.“ Nerd .”“Wh-! Takes one to know one!” Donatello laughs with her. Or, his processors automatically analyse her speech, classify it as amusing, consult his behavioural library on appropriate responses to comedic stimuli and retrieve exactly the output they need; the specific signals for the rhythmic shaking of his chest and shoulders, and the audio pattern of his voice to emit in controlled bursts from his speakers.This, he knows, in all the cold logical places of his inorganic heart. But in real time, seeing that vestige of a familiar grin on a still-freckled face that he very illogically recalled at least once every day before he was lucky enough to find it again . . . it doesn’t feel so very different from his memories of the real thing.