[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

[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!"

[captainbuzzkill]

"I want to do it! You never let me have any fun."

The bone saw snapped and broke apart as the twins cooperated to dismantle it together in a way that looked like they were tearing it apart fighting over it.

(They didn't try to actually fight over it because they both liked having fingers.)

"Let's both do it. Why don't we share? We're supposed to share our toys."

[bedazzledmyface]

"Well - maybe just this once."

And there they were. A boy and a girl. Standing side by side. Across the room. Staring at the scientists huddled under the computer console. Smiling.

"They look fun," said the girl.

And then they were gone.

Only to reappear a second later halfway across the room. Holding hands. Still smiling.

(sprinting that far that fast to make it look like they were teleporting really took it out of both of them, so later they'd have to congratulate each other on mutually getting their creepy game-smiles back in place so fast.)

"Sanjay looks unhappy though," the girl said. They vanished again, and suddenly they were there right there in front of the scientists.

The girl held out her hand and opened it. Yellowed objects spilled out of her hand and clattered on the floor in front of them.

"Deer teeth!" she intoned. "For you, Sanjay!"

[fearasaurusrex]

The scientists screamed bloody murder and scrambled out from under the console, tripping over the deer teeth as they tried to run away.

[captainbuzzkill]

They had so pulled off the creepy flashing thing perfectly. He was so proud of that.

They went back to the song to give Nico her cue.

"Any note you can reach, I can go higher! I can sing anything higher than you!"

[bedazzledmyface]

Mutual good job, Pines Twins. Mabel made a mental note to congratulate herself out loud, and Dipper too.

"No you caaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN'T"

Mabel's "high" note turned into a just plain "screaming" note.

[captainbuzzkill]

"Yes I caaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN"

Dipper's turned into one that was somehow even more shrill.

[spellitonce]

Nico had just finished scraping through the last symbol when the twins gave her the cue. The world's Most Obnoxious Cue Ever. Fortunately, her hangnail was still hanging in there.

"Shatter," she breathed. It didn't matter that she could barely hear herself over the twins' screaming. She didn't have to.

The transparent walls cracked and exploded outward, away from them, the turtle guys, and (sadly) the scientists.

[captainbuzzkill]

The three scientists threw themselves to the floor as the room exploded, and Dipper took that opportunity to take one of them out, slamming him in the back of the head with his book as hard as he could, knocking him clean out.

He was still invisible, so to the other two scientists and the turtles, it looked like the man just suddenly slumped down unconscious (or even dead).

[bedazzledmyface]

The other two went down with . . . kittens to the back of the head.

Seriously, kittens just exploded out of nowhere and crashed into both mens' heads with such force that they fell unconscious.

The unharmed kittens circled back, mewing cheerfully, and melded with the suddenly-visible little girl again.

She turned to the turtles, still grinning that huge, contextually creepy grin.

"Ohmygosh!"

To be fair, though, her voice no longer had the exaggerated creepiness of a little girl TRYING to be creepy.

"Hi, I'm Mabel! I like turtles, you're turtles, whaaaaat is going on here?"

[captainbuzzkill]

Dipper was grinning, too. It was the cheerful grin of someone wimpy who just busted into a secret government lab to spring innocent people from the hands of evil scientists, and who had, for the first time in his life, successfully intimidated the crap out of someone.

Someones, even! Plural!

Unfortunately, that meant that his grin wasn't that different than earlier, even if his tone of voice was now more natural.

"Mabel, please tell me you're not flirting with them. That is, like, the last thing they want to deal with right now, from anyone," Dipper said, running over to where Raph was strapped to the table. "Seriously, though, did you see their faces when we did the teleporty thing? Oh man that was great."

He unshackled Raphael's neck and then his hands.

"Don't worry, you two, we'll have you guys out of here in a second," he reassured him as he worked. "Then we'll take you somewhere s -"

He didn't get to say "safe" because Raphael's torso was free and that meant the first thing he'd done was turn and punch him right in the face.

"Oooooow!" he said, as he flew back, landing on his butt on the floor, holding his nose as he started bleeding. "And now I'm bleeding. Bleeding on my vest. Yep."

[othersdestructive]

At this point, Raph was operating on pure instinct, unshackling himself the rest of the way, launching off the bed, and staggering over to unshackle his brother.

While Dipper and Mabel and Nico'd been having fun scaring the scientists into defeat, he'd been laying on the table, helpless, watching a horror movie play out a few feet away. After nearly being cut open while still alive.

Without anesthetic.

"Terrified" was an understatement. Right now, he was so far gone he wasn't even thinking straight. It was all instinct, reduced down to: 'Hit anyone that moves that isn't Mikey, get Mikey free, go go go go go -'

Maybe they were little kids but they were little creepy ghosty murder kids. He was a pragmatist, so sue him.

[bestnamer]

"Raph no!" Mikey yelled, as - nope too late Raph punched the small boy.

Oops. Well.

"Raph I think they're on our side. I think they were trying to be creepy to scare the scientists and it worked! If this was a movie that's how it would go, this is the twist scene! Genre savvy, genre savvy!"

He rattled all this off WHILE helping Raph unshackle him as quickly as possible, though, because he did not want to spend one second shackled in this awful place any longer than he had to.