[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

[othersdestructive]

Oh thank goodness, he was okay.

"That subject isn't a subject. He has a name! It's Mikey!" Raph shouted as he thrashed against his bonds. "And my name is Raphael. We're people, just like you."

How could they listen to them talk and not realize that? They were talking about them like they were things and that was not good.

[bestnamer]

"Why am I 16?"

Mikey practically wailed it. It had no poetry. It had no meaning. It didn't accurately sum up the complex wholeness that was Michelangelo.

"I dub thee 26," he howled in sedated defiance.

[fearasaurusrex]

"Both subjects are wearing the collars that we were told about by our contact. These are covered with runes of familiar origin, resembling our records of artifact 1453k, most likely meant to repress mythic abilities. This will provide us a unique opportunity in both exploring myth physiology and the subjects' own underlying unique physiology."

The scientists were getting something ready, laying out a tray of various nasty-looking tools that Raph could only likely see out of the corner of his eyes, but all of it was in plain sight of Mikey.

And it looked very not good.

"We have decided to start our experimentation by vivisecting subject T-15, as it seems more likely to survive the procedure than the smaller subject T-16. If it expires, we'll still be left with T-16 as a viable subject for experimentation."

[othersdestructive]

"'Vivisecting'? You're gonna vivisect me?!" Raph thrashed violently, so hard that he bruised himself even more. "You're crazy! You people are crazy! You can't do this! We're people, we're both people!"

How could they not see it? Yes they were ninjas, and mutants, and turtles, but that teenage part? That was pretty obvious to see.

"When I get loose from this I'm gonna take that saw and shove it right up your - OW!"

An IV catheter had been shoved in his arm and various IV bags were being hooked up above him.

[bestnamer]

Mikey started screaming. Sedative was a nice idea, but not when creepy faceless lab workers were preparing to vivisect Raphael. Mikey couldn't have defined "vivisect" if they'd asked him, but he could tell what a scalpel was for.

"You can't! You can't do that! He's my bro, dude! He's not T-15 he's Raphael and he's my brother! That's not right, dude, that's not right!"

[fearasaurusrex]

"Subject is secure. Anesthesia will only be used if the subject's vitals destabilize."

The scientist lifted up some kind of rotating saw - the kind of thing meant to cut through bone.

[othersdestructive]

This was it. There was no quick escape. Even if Leo and Donnie were in this world somewhere they probably had no idea where they were. No one was coming for them. For once, their brothers or April or Casey or Mater Splinter wouldn't be there with the last minute save and there was no way out on their own. The shackles were impossible to break.

Raph wanted to scream. Who didn't want to scream when some insane scientist was coming after them with a bone saw like they were fresh out of some kind of torture crazy horror movie?

But he couldn't scream. He wouldn't scream.

"Mikey, close your eyes!" Raph cried out to his brother, trying to keep his voice from shaking. "Just close 'em tight, okay? It's not gonna be pretty but just - just close your eyes. I'll make it, Mikey, you know I'm tough enough! Just close your eyes, okay?"

And maybe, just maybe, he could be strong enough and not scream so that he didn't see or hear any of it.

[bestnamer]

Mikey would do all the screaming Raph wouldn't, anyway.

"No! No, please, don't!"

But then the bone saw was on, and Mikey had to scream with all he was worth just to be heard over it, as loud as if HE was the one being vivisected.

He struggled against the shackles, adrenaline pumping so hard that he actually managed to make a few of them move against the table. Not enough to get out. Not nearly enough to get out. But enough that he was definitely putting strain on the table.

Because someone was going to hurt Raph, and Raph was going to not let them know just how much so that Mikey wouldn't know how much he was hurting, except Mikey would know. Mikey had to know from the sound of the bone saw and the other sounds that had to come after, what plastron sounded like when it was sawed through and the turtly bits underneath being taken apart -

"STOP! STOP! JUST LEAVE HIM ALONE! PLEASE - PLEASE NO -"

This was what Master Splinter had always warned them about. This was what they'd never truly imagined enough to be properly terrified of.

Mikey dissolved into horrified sobs, fighting so hard against his restraints that he was bruising himself harder.

[othersdestructive]

Raph gritted his teeth at the bone saw approached, wincing away from it as it angled closer to the top of his chest, the squeezed his eyes shut as it started to grind against his plastron. A scream was threatening to burst out of him, he wanted to scream more than he ever had before in his life, but he held it in. Mikey was already crying, his brother was crying and it was the only thing he had the control to do to keep that crying from getting worse.

And just when it was about to cut through, when the pressure felt like it was starting to give way to pain, the room suddenly went dark.

[fearasaurusrex]

The scientist immediately shut off the saw and red emergency lights started to flicker on, replacing the harsh white lights of before.

"What happened to the power?"

The horrible tool was placed back on the tray as Raph got a reprieve, and the scientists bustled to consoles to check things.

One of them tapped a console on a wall. "Evans to security. What's going on? What happened to the power?"

For a moment, the only response was crackling static.

"I said, Evans to security. Security, come in. What happened to the power? We're down to backup generators in Lab Four."

More static, then a voice screaming in the background.

"They're coming! They got in, how did they get in through the security doors!"

The sound of yelling filled the air and then silence.

"Security! This is Evans! Report! What's going on in the rest of the facility?"

More silence. Just the crackled of static. And then...

[captainbuzzkill]

There were two voices speaking in unison over the comm, two similar sounding children's voices, a boy and a girl.

"They didn't want to play with us. Do you want to play?"

Then there was the sound of their laughter moving away from the comms.

[bedazzledmyface]

In the comms room, Mabel was sorting through personnel files.

"Okay so the surgeons are Jeremy, Gordon, and Sanjay. Let's remember that and freak them out by name."

It was so hard not to crack up in the middle of freaking people out, but gosh, did these people deserve to be freaked.

[captainbuzzkill]

Dipper glanced over her shoulders at the pictures so they could tell them apart.

"They definitely deserve it. But let's keep moving. We need to keep them off balance but if we take too long they might move them - or hurt them."

[spellitonce]

"As long as the power's out and we're running around being distracting, they're not likely to try and hurt them," Nico said, glaring at the photos. "But let's not leave those two in their clutches any longer than we have to."

She brought her hand to her mouth and bit down on the hangnail again until it bled, then prodded the nearest computer with the Staff.

"Norton can't save you now," she said. Whatever information these people had in their computers about capturing and restraining spirits, they weren't going to have for long.

[bestnamer]

In the dark and the absence of the buzz saw, Mikey had stopped crying.

"Are we NOT getting vivisected today or what?"

His normally glib tone was still strained with terror, because there was not crying and screaming, and then there was "just holding off on it for now."

[othersdestructive]

Raph, on the other hand had started crying, out of a mix of relief that he wasn't dead yet and terror that he still was going to be dead, since the room was now dark enough for no one to see.

As tough as he acted and as tough as he actually was, he still had a cut in his plastron right now, probably millimeters away from the flesh underneath, and like any teenager would've been in this situation, he was terrified.

But like Mikey, he wasn't ready to count them both as saved yet.

"I dunno what's going on. I don't think they do, either," Raph said, his voice creaky.

One of the scientists turned and hushed him.

"Correction: they definitely don't."

They were obviously terrified.

There was no way of knowing yet if that was a good thing, though. Okay, so something was here that was creepy and terrifying them but that didn't necessarily mean that whatever it was, whatever the source of those creepy voices had been, was planning on helping them out, either. For all they knew, it was coming for them all.

[bedazzledmyface]

The fwoosh behind the surgeons was barely followed by an interval before the following fwoosh as the doors opened and closed. Barely enough time for anything to slip in, and yet as the doors opened, there were already voices -

"-nything you can do, I can do better -"

A little girl's voice, dragging each note out like it was a saw through bone.

[captainbuzzkill]

They heard only wisps of the song until the two voices started to become clear enough that they could be heard coming from every direction.

Every note had a creepy cadence to it, liked the children singing with it like to play with their words as much as their victims.

"No you can't..."

A monitor screen was suddenly smashed.

[bedazzledmyface]

"YES I CAN!"

A scalpel went flying into a wall, like the child singing had very suddenly lost her temper.

The bone saw was rising from the table.

"Any bone you can saw, I can saw faster -"

[captainbuzzkill]

"No, I can saw any bone faster than you!" insisted the other child, picking up another large cleaver-like tool. "Don't you want to help me show her, Jeremy? You should play with me."

[fearasaurusrex]

All three scientists shrieked like terrified children and tried to cram together under a computer console, cowering away from the floating torture surgical tools.

[othersdestructive]

Raph's eyes went wide.

"How did this get worse?!" he cried out. "How in the heck did this actually somehow get worse?!"

Now they were in a horror movie all of a sudden? After already having been in one. Now it was two horror movies. At the same time.

[bestnamer]

Mikey's gaze just flitted from floating tool to tool in bewildered disbelieving horror. The Taunting Ginger (Mikey couldn't even remember the name he'd given them) had talked about genre-savviness, and this made no sense from a genre-savvy perspective. You didn't just go from one horror movie to another. Not like this.

Not unless . . . the movie was playing a trick on you.

Mikey wanted to yell his conclusion to Raph, but there was a chance that if he was right, that could get them in more trouble than they were actually in, so he pressed his mouth shut, groaning as if he were trying to contain his own terror, which . . . he sort of still was.

These could, after all, be legit ghosts coming back to haunt the scientists. If any place had the means to be haunted, it had to be this house of horrors.

[spellitonce]

Nico felt awful for the poor people these scientists had strapped to tables, but she couldn't get close enough to them to reassure them -- not with Mabel and Dipper waving saws and knives around. Instead, she went to work on the runes painted on the walls, scraping at them with the ring on the Staff. She didn't trust that her magic would work right with the runes in place, and she wanted to make sure they'd all be able to get out of here if it turned out there were other security protocols in place.

Of course, with the ruckus the twins were making, no one was likely to even notice what she was doing...

[bedazzledmyface]

"-nything you can - ugh - do, I can do better-"

The creepy singing was punctuated by grunts of effort, as the bone saw jerked back and forth, as if two invisible children were fighting over it.

"GIVE IT!"