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

Chapter 11: Red Blue Orange Purple

Was this what it was like in the egg...?

Raphael floated in a sea of darkness. Floated, flew, swam... It was pure guesswork. There was no up, there was no down, there was no sideways, there was no past or future.

There were colors. If he let his mind wander, he could let the swirls of color wash over them and then wane only to be replaced by a new rush of color. Red. Blue. Orange. Purple. Back to red. Blue. Orange. Purple...

He wondered if they had some kind of significance. If they had, he couldn't see what it was. That was no surprise, though, because he didn't actually know for sure who he was...

***

Three weeks ago...

He stood in the shadows and brooded. He did that well. Better than anyone else he could think of. It was more difficult here than in New York, certainly, as people tended to stop and have a second look at the curious figure in the trench-coat and the hat. Though the badly maintained streetlights helped.

Well, let them look. If they saw anything it just made them walk a little quicker in future.

Here was a little town in upstate New York, a little lakeside place called... Lakeside. 'Hell of an imagination, the people who founded this town. He was... Let's just say he wasn't from here. A large green hand with a thumb and two fingers reached up and adjusted the hat, and he sighed. He missed home.

Raphael looked at the ground and gave one more, heartfelt, sigh. "I'm tired of this s"-

-"Hit it!" suggested Michelangelo. When Leonardo looked round at him irritably, he added sheepishly "That always works for me."

Donatello crouched over the desk. "Hi, Master, it's Donatello. Hey, I know you wanted us to stay incommunicado up here... We were worried about you. I rigged up this phone, so if you need us just call... Uh, I got the number here somewhere..."

The three of them – Leonardo, Michelangelo and Donatello – looked up as Raphael walked in. He tossed the hat onto a table and threw off the coat, while Donatello quietly read the number in front of him into the receiver.

"Where have you been?" Leonardo asked in a reasonable tone.

"Out," Raphael replied. Neither of them pursued the matter any further than that.

"I hope everything is OK back there," Leonardo fretted. He looked dubiously at the mess of wires and components held together with tape and gum that Donatello assured them was now a working telephone. "You sure this thing's working, Donny?"

"Yeah," was the reply. "It's working just fine. I got the Answerphone."

"Answerphone," said Raphael irritably. "That's real helpful, Donny. Sorry, I can't come to the 'phone right now. I'm being attacked by forty members of the Foot Clan. Or maybe I'm just in the bath. Basically, you can't tell!" He turned to Leonardo and snarled "Face it, Leo - We're forgotten out here."

There was a moment of tension as the two stared at each other, then they both backed away.

Leonardo spoke, apparently as much to himself as the others. "Master Splinter said when it was time to go back, we'd know."

Michelangelo thought for a moment. "Hey, do you think Roy's will deliver pizza out this far?"

Leonardo continued to fret. "I sure wish we could see what was going on back home. Hey, maybe we should try contacting April... But then, Master Splinter was pretty clear about that too..."