Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Day of the Rat (A 90s Movies Story)

Chapter 9: Generation Gap

Master...?" Leonardo stepped forward, and Splinter's eyes moved to follow him. They still showed no sign of recognition. "It's us..."

Raphael approached too and looked up at their sensei. He turned to the others and shook his head. "Guys... There's definitely something wrong here. This is some kind of trap. Let's just grab him and get outta here."

Michelangelo lolloped forward like an overgrown puppy. "OK, master. Don't you move. I'm coming up there." He climbed up towards Splinter's position above them, and their sensei slowly walked over to meet him. As Michelangelo reached the same level, he held out a hand and the Turtle took it automatically.

He yelped as Splinter twisted his wrist and propelled him with an extended foot out into mid-air. Splinter watched expressionlessly as Michelangelo hit the ground like a very surprised stone and lay there on his back, dazed.

"Guys... Did Master Splinter ever mention if he had an evil twin...?"

"What's going on here...?" Leonardo walked over to the fallen Michelangelo to help him get off his back and was stopped abruptly as a shuriken clanged off a pipe far too near to his head for comfort. All three Turtles gaped as Splinter flipped over the safety rail and climbed smoothly down to their level and stood confronting them.

Splinter extended his arms in an unmistakable gesture of challenge.

***

"P-Piz-za..."

"Hrrrmmm..." Splinter took a look round his four small charges. Three of them looked back at him with differing levels of attention. One of them was wandering off. No prizes for guessing which...

Splinter picked up Raphael as he moved away, turned him round and set him on the ground again, and watched him return to the others without breaking his stride. "Turt-le..." he said again, slowly, beginning to get a little impatient.

"Piz-za..."

Splinter sighed. The task he had undertaken was proving to be a little more difficult even than he had imagined. Who knew how long it would take, and indeed where it would lead him and his four protégés..?

***

As Leonardo was slammed into the tunnel wall for the fourth time, he fancied he heard a disturbing sound. Like an eggshell breaking, if you could imagine something similar to but many times tougher than an eggshell. That wasn't good. Would his shell heal if given the chance? He hoped to have the opportunity to find out.

"What?" Lying on his back a few feet away, Raphael was still in denial about what was happening to them. They had tried going in one at a time, they had tried going in co-coordinated waves, and they had tried rushing him en masse. Splinter was unbeatable, at least to them. He barely moved, that was the infuriating thing. A sidestep here, a nonchalant trip and a barely perceptible whack with his stick equaled one Turtle senseless on the ground.

Of course, they had to use kid gloves. They couldn't risk harming their master, though Leonardo suspected there was fat chance of that anyway. There was no trick he could devise that Splinter wouldn't be able to counter, indeed most of them would have been the ones he had taught them in the first place. They couldn't use their superior agility in this confined space, and even if they could he knew Splinter would probably find a way to counter that too.

Leonardo had no cards left to play, and he had a horrible feeling they were running out of time.

***