Gargoyles X TMNT: Shadows of New York

Big Apple, 3 AM

Elisa probably shouldn't have been surprised by the number of fire trucks, cruisers, ambulances, unmarked cars, and ominous black SUVs that swarmed the neighborhood.

But she was.

They fell on the block like a cloud of red-and-blue glowing locusts with shimmering carapaces in many colors, packed in loose huddles and crammed against the wall of the building. Firefighters and officers trickled into buildings like ants into anthills. Lights were on in nearly every window, and curious eyes peered out at the street, as if anxious to leave once the all-clear was given.

Elisa couldn't blame them. She had her hands in her pockets, sitting on the hood of a white cruiser. She felt dog-tired, and would have absolutely taken a nap right there on the ground if she didn't already have ten other things to do at that moment. Looking at the sea of plain-clothes, armored, and uniformed officers and first responders, she found herself looking for a particular puff of red hair.

Ah, there he was. Her favorite pain in the neck. Matt Bluestone.

She leaned forward, walking towards him. She lifted a hand. "Hey, partner."

Matt looked up at her. He was handsome, with a strong jaw and laser-blue eyes that seemed to focus tightly on anything nearby that caught his attention. He seemed to live for the detective stereotype. He was so disappointed when Captain Chavez refused to let him wear a fedora on duty, but he still wore that vintage trench coat like he was born with it. His hair was almost a comical shade of red, so bright and coppery that it would have looked more at home on a clown than a cop. It didn't help that the other detectives saw Matt as a clown in his own right.

Matt was an odd duck, to be sure. What made them both odd was that, even before the towers went down, neither of them exactly fit in with the rest of their cohort. What set them on the outside? Well, they both actually gave a damn when they weren't paid to. It was probably the only thing they had in common, along with Derek and Morgan. It was all they needed to have in common.

He tucked his notebook into his trench coat pocket. She could see the indecipherable line of scratches and loops that made up Matt's own invented form of shorthand. He put his pencil behind his ear, and smiled at Elisa. "Hey, partner." He replied. "You're the one who called this in, right?"

"On the heels of about forty phone calls to dispatch." She sighed. "I happened to be in the neighborhood."

"Anything you can tell me?" Matt asked.

"About nine different suspects, one of them a minor. No clear looks at any faces, so no solid leads, except for part of a license plate and the name of the juvenile connected with this."

"You know her?"

"She was in my cruiser when I responded to the bogey call a few hours ago. I was about to drop her off at her home address. I ended up having to fire shots before I chased the bogey here on foot."

When things started getting 'weird' in the 80s or so, no one wanted to say 'monster sighting'. 'Monster' had a lot of uncomfortable concepts attached to it. Concepts like invulnerability, unstoppability, unfathomability. It made people think of Godzilla, King Kong, and the Thing. It made people refuse to take such calls unless they were paid to do it, trained to do it, and could reassign anyone else to do it. There were no monsters in the NYPD's official records. There were 'bogeys'. And bogeys were for suckers.

She and Matt were Manhattan 23's designated suckers; they handled 'the bogey calls'. A fool's errand, until they had no other fools to throw at a deadly, unimaginable, eldritch problem. She and Matt were both bullied relentlessly in the office. Once, someone had gifted her a plush toy of Slimer the Ghost... by attaching it to a tripwire on the door of their office.