ya_assemble | [LN] Can't get to his heart through his stomach. The plastron gets in the way.

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[LN] Can't get to his heart through his stomach. The plastron gets in the way.

Well, her first unsupervised mission had gone well -- they'd located and rescued a couple more people for the fight against Kuk, none of them had gotten hurt, and there was a whole gaggle of scientists who were reconsidering their stance on how to react to aliens. Not bad for an afternoon's work. She'd turned the mutant turtles over to Jack and Bunny for the full run-down, unleashed Dipper and Mabel to go do whatever it was the two of them did in their free time, and worked the rest of her adrenaline out on her latest sewing project.

The end result was a new hat for Molly (whenever she got back home. If she got back home) and a sugar craving that she could indulge since the North Pole's usual occupant was technically more famous among his preferred audience for his sweet tooth than he was for his ability to stab things really well.

It seemed that she wasn't the only one in the mood for a snack. A whole bunch of snacks had been laid out on a table in the kitchen, all of them looking a little picked over. She blinked at them, then at the turtle half-buried in the nearest cupboard.

"Are you throwing a party or testing for poison?"

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"We saw how they liked it when the Skrulls showed up," Nico said. "They didn't like it at all. Which is pretty pathetic considering that some of them were professionals. Sadly, too busy fighting for our lives to gloat."

She nibbled the remains of her gingerbread person. "But regular people shouldn't have to deal with Nazis made out of bees. No one should have to deal with Nazis made out of bees, but at least we're a little better equipped to deal with him. And if they didn't want us acting as Good Samaritans, then they should have arrested our parents before they made L.A. their personal fiefdom."

"Don't say that. Don't make me imagine a universe where people can be made out of bees. Because if weird stuff like that is possible in other worlds, it's only a matter of time before it happens in mine. We already did the giant mutant wasp thing as is, and it was a lot worse than it just being giant, mutated, and a wasp, despite the fact that it being something worse than that should've been impossible."

He shuddered at the memory.

He was going to swing the conversation back to the fiefdom thing in a moment or two. Right now he was freaking out over the fact that now that he knew it was even possible, a person made of bees was practically inevitable in his world.

There was mutagen, there were bees, it was going to happen. If Spyroach could happen, a man made of bees could happen.

Nico snorted and popped the last leg of her gingerbread person into her mouth. "I suggest bug spray or electricity, in case of Bee Nazis," she said. Because she was definitely more willing to deal with the Swarm than a giant mutated wasp. Ugh.

"I guess it's better that it's all little bees than one big bee," said Raph, still looking horrified. "Did they at least give normal bee stings?"

"I think so, but you'd have to ask Vic," Nico said with a shrug. "He's the heroes-and-villains nerd. None of us got stung."

And she accidentally teleported herself and Karolina out of town.

"That makes me hate the universe a little less," said Raph. "'Cause the giant mutant wasp we fought? It stung my brother and infected him with a virus that messed with his head so he'd watch over its egg, so the larva had something to eat when it hatched. He bit me and we kept attacking each other so it spread through the rest of my brothers, but luckily Donnie got a cure started before he turned and Mikey finished it."

That. Had been. Super creepy.

"Although the scariest part of that wasn't the virus. I think the scariest part of that is everything was left to Mikey. Doing science. You've met my brother. Most of the time, science for him is experimentally eating things he finds on the ground."

Edited 2014-10-30 09:13 (UTC)

"Gross," Nico said, considering throwing the remains of her cookie at him. Mind-control wasps, ugh.

"Mikey and the elves will get along great, then," she said, shaking her head. "That's their hobby, too."

"It does my heart glad to know he's finally found friends on his level," Raph joked, holding a hand to his heart as if touched. "I'm sure they'll find a lot of common ground in eating unidentifiable substances and in touching things they shouldn't touch."

He shook his head, the smile on his face making clear that all the joking was meant to be (mostly) affectionate, and picked up a pastry, cramming it into his mouth.

"So moving on from the subject of killer bee people and the horrifying jumps my brain is making in pointing out their existence means it's possible there could be people made of cockroaches instead of just giant ones..."

Just giant ones, as if he had experience with them already.

"What did you mean about your parents making LA their personal fiefdom? How exactly does one pull that off when feudalism ain't such a thing anymore?"

Edited 2014-10-30 10:04 (UTC)

"Remind me to put him on the list of people who shouldn't touch my Staff, then," Nico said, nodding toward the weapon she'd leaned against the counter. Though Mikey touching it probably wouldn't get her permanently on Nicholas St. North's Naughty List.

Nico finished the rest of her gingerbread person, then grabbed a candy cane.

"Think crime bosses," she said, snapping the candy cane in half. "Only with magic, advanced technology, mutant and alien powers, and monster bosses as back-up. All very subtle and under the radar, mostly. But they owned the police department and the media. We ran when we saw them ritually murder a girl, and they pinned us with her death."

She snapped the candy cane again. This...wasn't her favorite topic. But then, her parents never had been.

At that there was a flicker of genuine sympathy, something that wasn't always common to see on his face even if it existed more frequently in his heart than most would think.

"That pretty much sucks beyond all previously recorded levels of sucking," he said, giving her a genuinely empathetic look. Not a pitying one, it was to be noted. It definitely reeked more of 'you shouldn't have had to put up with that shit' than 'you poor thing.'

"I'm sorry. Nobody deserves to deal with something like that. So did they just hide it all your life or something or did they try to drag you into it?"

He was curious to know if she'd been raised in it like Karai.

'That sucks' is an understatement, but it almost startles a laugh out of her. The adults she'd interacted with over it had pitied her, and the kids had all been too uncomfortable. Vic had said something similiar, but he'd been trying to convince them that he wasn't going to grow up to be a supervillain at the time, so she'd mostly just wanted to hit him upside the head. When Raph says it though, she relaxes -- just slightly, but she does.

"Hid it," she said, looking down at the candy pieces in her hands. She snapped one of the larger ones. "They tried to say that they were doing it all for our sake, though. Destroy the world so we could have something better."

Her parents hadn't tried to drag her in. Not until after Alex had failed to.

"That's good at least that they didn't try to mess you up from when you were little," Raph said. "Getting raised up in it is where it gets tough to break away. That's what happened to our sister - or our half-sister? I don't know how that works when you're related through mutating and absorbing someone's DNA. Master Splinter's enemy, the Shredder, kidnapped her way back when Splinter was human. Splinter thought she was dead all these years but really Shredder raised her as his own daughter and told her Master Splinter killed her mother when really he did it."

He raised his eyebrows in a very clear 'Ain't that some shit?' expression. For all he was a turtle guy he sure had a near normal range of teenaged "wtf" faces.

"She kept trying to kill him and us before she finally found out the truth and who her real father was and realized she'd been set against her own family by the person that killed her mother."

A pause.

"That's not to say that what you went through wasn't bad - it sounds terrible - but at least you're not as entrenched in all the craziness. She was a little..." He opened his eyes wide and made a whirly gesture with his finger at his temple. "Like, in a homicidal way."

Edited 2014-10-30 11:01 (UTC)

Raph has no room to talk about how weird her world is when his family tree apparently includes 'related via mutation and DNA absorption'. But Nico nodded in agreement, making a "wtf" face of her own.

"That would definitely mess someone up," she agreed. "But it's good she's got people to catch her now that she knows the truth."

The six of them had only had each other. And then Alex had shown his true colors.

"Some adults just really shouldn't be allowed anywhere near kids."

"Tell me about it. Me and my brothers were lucky. We would've been four little freaky mutant turtle kids growing up alone in the sewers if Master Splinter hadn't decided to take us in. And he didn't just do the minimum, he taught us how to talk and homeschooled us and taught us how to fight so we could take on whatever the world threw at us. The first time he let us go up to the surface when we were fifteen, he was freaking out worrying and telling us to be careful to look both ways when crossing the street."

He'd taught them to speak and bandaged their boo boos and done airplane to make them eat their algae. He'd read them books and fixed up a broken TV and VCR and scavenged trash in the shadows to get them cartoons to watch.

Over time, the grimy little life they lived had gotten better and better as they built their home in the sewers - and it wouldn't have been a home at all if not for Master Splinter. It would've been four voiceless, scared little freakboys hiding alone in darkness and slime away from a world that would have never accepted them.

His expression grew a little distant as he thought about it. There was a part of him that wanted to think the same thing as Mikey and Leo, that he might still be alive out there, somewhere, wondering what had happened to his sons and April.

"He was a good dad. And a good teacher."

Past tense. Because now he was probably gone.

Edited 2014-10-31 06:04 (UTC)

Oh. Well. That sucked, too.

"I'm sorry," she said, fiddling with her pieces of candy cane. "Which never...it doesn't mean much, I know, but that sucks."

She didn't want her parents back, no way, not after what had happened when they'd encountered Mr. Wilder and the Yorkses; she had no interest in ever encountering her parents again, but losing them hadn't been the greatest experience of her life either. And Raph's dad sounded like he'd been one of the good ones.

"We, uh. We got our butts kicked when the Kraang -these crazy aliens from another dimension - invaded New York. Had to go into hiding upstate. But before we left, the Shredder and Master Splinter got into a fight and the rest of us were blocked by a sewer grate so we couldn't help."

He let that trail off, staring at the wall.

"He might still be alive but it's not likely."

Eventually he stopped staring blankly ahead and went back to the pastries, crushing one of them on purpose this time.

"And now we're stuck in this stupid place and we have to stop another stupid invasion from outside the universe, and two of my brothers and our two friends are probably back home freaking out right now wondering where we went." He flailed skyward, crankily. "It's like the stupid universe thinks we don't already have enough on our plates."

Edited 2014-10-31 07:11 (UTC)

"Ugh, I know," Nico said, seizing on the change of subject with gusto. "My friends probably think I got snapped back to 1907 somehow, or got eaten by the 'Frog or who knows what."

She crunches down on one of the pieces of her candy cane.

"...The Kraang wouldn't happen to be sixty feet tall with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, would they?"

That was something they should definitely bond over: hating the stupid universe at the moment.

"Nah, they're these big pink brains with tentacles and faces and they ride around in creepy robots and talk all weird. Like this -" His voice took on a robotic tone and he did robot arms along with it. "'We are the Kraang and we see you in this place. This place is a place we do not wish to be seeing you in so we the Kraang are now going to kill you in this place that is now the place where you're going to be killed by the Kraang in this place.'"

They were so weird.

Nico relaxed a hair or two. Maybe the Gibborim really were all the way gone this time.

"Wow, they need their butts kicked just for that," she said. "Good luck fighting them when you get back." At least the invasion of the Skrulls had mostly wrapped when Nico got sucked into all this. "I'd give you tips, but I mostly survived our last alien invasion through dumb luck."

"It's just one of many reasons they deserve having their butts kicked, trust me."

He pointed at her with an eclair.

"And what, you're telling me you only just got by with that little sparkle princess wand of yours? Maybe you'd have had a better chance if you weren't missing the tiara that probably goes with it."

Yes, he was going to be a shit. They were actually getting along, of course he had to be a shit. That was what he did with people he got along with, he busted their chops.

Nico briefly narrowed her eyes, crunching another piece of her candy cane.

"You must have mistaken me for Glenda the Good Witch," she said sweetly. "Tiaras don't really go with magic fueled by the caster's blood."

Raph just blinked for a second or two, his eyes opening up wide.

"Your staff's magic is fueled by the power of your blood."

Here came the judgement and the being creeped out by that very obvious dark magi -

"That. Is. So cool."

- Or not.

What? He was a teenage boy and one that particularly liked stuff that was kinda metal. Magic powered by blood was super freakin' metal.

"How much more hardcore can you get? The only way that could be more badass was like if it was fueled by the blood of your enemies or something."

"'Fueling it with the blood of my enemies' reeeeeally isn't a path I want to go down," Nico said. She wouldn't be surprised if there was a way to do that. She couldn't exactly picture her mother carrying around a knife or ruining her manicures by picking at them. Maybe the Witchbreaker would shed her own blood, but she'd very (horribly) clearly had access to plenty of it from other sources.

Nico shivered and forced the memory away. Non-creepy enthusiasm was definitely better than the dire squint-and-mumble she'd gotten from the Easter Bunny, at least.

"Besides, we were just talking about how sometimes my enemies are Nazi bees. Bees don't really have blood."

"Well, I figure if it's magic, it'd only have to be a teeny tiny bit of blood. Which is a normal thing in any fight."

He paused.

"Then again, I'm a ninja. Sometimes I forget it's not normal to go into everything perfectly okay with that kinda thing. For most people, anyway."

If they didn't fight so many robots and the Kraang weren't so good at squiddling off (and weren't so harmless outside their bodies) he'd have had a hell of a body count by now. He and his brothers didn't exactly hold back when they were in the thick of it and tended to only cut losers like the Purple Dragons some slack since theywere so incompetent as to be relatively harmless. Otherwise, consensus was they'd kill Shredder the first time one of them had a chance to get in a good shot.

"Did you even get a chance to train before you got involved in all the...whatever it was you got into? Superheroing, I guess?"

Edited 2014-11-02 06:54 (UTC)

"It is only a little bit of blood," Nico said. "But from a practical perspective, I'd still have to bloody someone up and, well, I'm pretty sure that your forearm is bigger around than my thigh." She rolled another piece of her candy cane across her tongue. "And, considering my family history, it's probably best that I stay squeamish about other people's blood."

She almost choked on her candy cane scoffing at his question. "Training with who? My evil parents who wanted to destroy the world? The Avengers, who showed up just long enough to chuck me and my friends in separate orphanages after our parents died? One of the many, many magic users my parents pissed off in their extended career of theft and violence?" She shook her head. "The first time I got anything like training was a couple days before I got dragged here. We ran away the first time about a year before that."

She reached blindly for the Staff and released a shaky breath only when she felt its familiar texture against her palm. Her mouth quirked up in a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "So no, I'm almost completely self-taught. And we're not super heroes, we don't go looking for crime to fight; it mostly just happens and we do our best to stop it so we can get out of there before the authorities arrive."

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