[LN] Raphael is cool but rude, Michelangelo is a party dude...

[othersdestructive]

"Jus' - jus' five more minutes, Master Splinter."

Come on, it'd been a busy night. Couldn't he sleep in just a little bit longer?

Except...except he wasn't in the lair.

As Raph opened his eyes, he realized he wasn't even in the city.

New York was New York and after spending the majority of his life under it, and exploring every facet of it from above after he and his brothers had started exploring at night, it was practically in his blood.

Wherever he was now, it didn't look like New York, it didn't sound like New York - it definitely didn't smell like New York.

And his head felt like it'd been cracked open and...something was rushing in. Something unnameable and shifting. It was making even his memories fuzzy. It was almost like something that wasn't himself was trying to push in and make...something else into himself. For a moment, all he could do was push himself up onto his knees and hunch over, holding his head in his hands.

"Ugh, my head."

Comments

[bestnamer]

"Raph, you hear that?"

Mikey had seen a lot in his life that was weird and unexpected, a lot that he'd never thought he'd see, that went against rationality. And that was just at HOME. The stuff that had happened since he and Raph woke up at the abandoned carnival were just a different kind of weirdness.

And this was the surprise that topped them all.

"Bro. We really are in their movies here. Bro, they like us for it."

Amazing. Mind-blowing. They're just kids. The same sort of people who ran screaming from them in their New York were running and screaming to save them.

Between all the pain and hopelessness that had suddenly, completely without warning, turned into hope, Mikey was crying. Not sobbing, not anything noisy, just a constant stream of tears that he couldn't have stopped if he tried.

People were trying to save them, and Mikey really, really wanted to meet the sort of people who'd try to save two mutant freakboys whose stories they thought were radical. But mostly, he wanted to meet the guy who'd yelled "cowabunga."

He scrabbled around on the asphalt below them for something, anything, any bit of the debris that New York was good at accumulating that could help free them. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted the gleam of broken glass - a tiny, small shard, but still better than nothing.

"Hey, lean over to the right. I gotta grab something."

He'd neglected to say whose right.

[othersdestructive]

"This really is another world," Raph said slowly, his throat slightly choked. "And we really are in their movies or something here."

And they...liked them? Some of them were even willing to face down armed government agents to help them?

Raph could barely wrap his head around it. For so long he'd carried around so much anger, a lot of it directed at the world in general. Only the world he'd always directed it was a world where people screamed when they saw them.

It wasn't this one, where he saw a woman trying to fight past some FBI type mook, looking at him with desperation in her gaze.

He watched as she dropped to the ground, twitching as she was tazed.

"Hey! HEY!" he screamed. "Leave her alone! Just leave them alone!"

They were getting hurt trying to help him and Mikey and with how violent things were getting, it was only a matter of time before someone died.

So as soon as Mikey said he'd spotted something, he leaned, hoping he'd found something to cut them free with.

...leaned to his own right, naturally.

[bestnamer]

"No dude, your other right!"

[othersdestructive]

"That's my left, numbnuts!"

The agents were now paying more attention to the turtles again, just as Raph dove to his left, but now Mikey was in a position to get his hands on the shard of glass.

[bestnamer]

Mikey snatched up the glass shard and started sawing at their bonds.

"How cool is this? How cool are they?" he had to ask, in a whisper this time, jerking his head towards the people. All it did was jerk their neck-ties tightly, hurting them both, but hey, what was a little pain in the face of a righteous mob on their side?

[othersdestructive]

"It's pretty cool," Raph admitted. "But what we're about to do is gonna be even cooler."

The ropes tying them together at the waist snapped and Raph grabbed the glass from Mikey's hand, slitting the ropes at his neck in one very dangerous swipe that made them snap right away. Naturally, the force of it meant he'd nicked his own neck in the process, but what was a little more blood when they were already battered messes?

At least the two of them weren't tied to each other, even if their hands and feet were still tied.

"Now let's give our fans a little show."

Then he hopped to his feet, arms and feet still bound and jumped into action, flipping with both hands bound and kicking one of the agents in the chest with both feet.

[bestnamer]

None of the agents were shooting yet, probably because that would just cause WAY too much trouble if a civilian got hit at this point. All to the turtles benefit, as Mikey headbutted one agent and then flipped sideways onto several of them, knocking them over and rolling out of the way as one still on his feet tried to taze him, but ended up tazing one of the downed agents instead.

"TURTLE POWER!" someone yelled from the crowd, as Mikey flipped to his feet, the biggest smile on his face.

"Yeah!" he yelled, bouncing in place, since he couldn't really do a victory dance. "Yeah, what that guy said!"

The responding cheer from the crowd of civilians made him smile so big it was possible his face might split in half. He still anticipated the agent tackling him from behind, though, and backflipped so that the agent pratfalled right underneath him, prompting more cheers from the crowd.

[morethanmyth]

In the crowd one young woman realized she could do the impossible. She could make something that had only been cool when she'd been five cool once more. Using the lamest thing imaginable, she could transform this moment into something unforgettable.

It was the chance of a lifetime and despite the risk of sounding like a moron, she took that chance and shouted in a booming voice over the crowd:

"Go ninja, go ninja go, go ninja, go ninja go! Go, go, go, go!"

The people around her heard what she was doing and joined in, until the chant started to spread through the crowd.

"Go ninja, go ninja go, go ninja, go ninja go! Go, go, go, go!"

The entire crowd was starting to get into it now. Traffic had ground to a standstill as people crowded in, and the ones right at the edge were still trying their damndest to break through the line, taking advantage of the fact that all the reporters converging and the smartphones livestreaming made it so the agents couldn't exactly just open fire on the crowd.

[othersdestructive]

In the middle of fighting, Raph couldn't help but laugh.

"What. Is. That?" he cried out as his bashed one of the agents in the head with his bound together hands. "Are they rapping?"

[bestnamer]

"Don't be a hater," Mikey admonished. "I can dig their flow. It's great for punching mooks to."

[othersdestructive]

They did pretty well for two ninjas that were tied up, but the van doors opened and even more agents rushed out as backup - and these ones were smart enough to keep themselves at a distance.

They raised their tranq guns and fired multiple darts from all directions. Raph tried to knock them away with the thick ropes around his hands but several hit him anyway: one in the thigh, one in the upper arm, one in the calf.

"Mikey, try to - the crowd -" Mikey needed to make a break for the crowd, maybe they would hide him and free him, maybe...

Maybe...

Raph didn't have any more time to think about the maybes. As the chanting around them morphed into cries of distress and anger, the world went black.

[bestnamer]

Mikey made a break for it as best he could, but the best he could was not good enough. A flat bolt left him an easy target for the shooters, who tranqued him plenty good. He was unconscious before he even hit the ground at the edge of the ring.

"That is definitely not a suit!" a woman wrestling with an agent was yelling. "Is anyone getting this? Is anyone seeing this? What the hell is going on?"

She kept repeating the question, at the top of her lungs, into the agent's face, distracting him long enough that a kid with a smartphone was able to crawl unimpeded to the edge of the clear ring and catch some truly good footage of the prone ninja turtle, and the agents already loading Raph into a van.

All, ultimately, to plan, unfortunately for them, as the agents ripped Mikey out of the view of the kid's cameraphone and threw him in a truck too. Seconds later, people were scattering as the vans took off, leaving the scene bare of any turtle evidence.

They had all this footage, all their memories of the struggle - and of losing it.