Superhero

Donatello was dangerous. It was something Mikey always knew and never forgot, but sometimes it still surprised him.

Being both ninja and eclectic scientist seemed to make Donnie a superhero, although the last time Mikey brought that up, Don just grinned and waved it off as another comic book fantasy.

"Ugh, you like fantasy too, dork," Mikey had huffed under his breath.

Michelangelo guessed he'd never truly known how dangerous until Don saved his life one February day, from a bizarre new predator in the sewers.

They had argued. Mikey had wanted to drag Donnie out of the lab, Donnie had wanted to finish some work. Raph hollered at them both. Don literally shoved Mikey out of the lab. Leonardo thrust a skateboard into Mike's hands and told him to get some exercise.

Rude. Mikey hid his deep hurt under a scowl, trotting out of the lair.

Deciding to take a whole new path down tunnels might've not been a good idea, but his head was cloudy, his emotions clogged and writhing behind pain and frustration.

This new tunnel was freezing and its atmosphere purred with supernatural energy. Mikey rarely bragged about his empathic clairvoyance, built up during his teens after that Ninja Tribunal deal, content to bother his family with being the Turtle Titan and - shout it! - Battle Nexus Champion. The psychic stuff was for hero work, even though it came in handier with ninja stuff. It rose up from the depths of his limbic system and swept across his mind, drawing in the abstract strangeness of the foreign tunnel and making him pause. There was something alive down here. Sentient.

Intelligent.

Michelangelo had a bright yellow flash of warning in his head a second before something warm crashed into him, knocking him off his board.

The back of his head and the lip of his shell hit the ground first, straining muscles in his neck and shoulders. Consciousness flickered as vertigo struck, and that was all it took for his "secondary" nervous system - the newly powerful Chi that ran through his spiritual body and fueled his ESP - to kick in and take over. He found himself halfway conscious and halfway in the astral plane, with a reptilian beast the size of a wolf pinning him, growling down into his face.

"Guess I stumbled into prime territory," Mikey whispered, slowly moving backward while projecting an aura of calm. The ground was like ice. The creature must have a unique physiology to live like this-

His senses bounced around. Oh. It had fur. It gave off heat.

It was a mutant, his psychic mind supplied helpfully.

"Donnie would get a kick out of this..."

He'd scooted all the way against a wall, when the creature shook its head and snapped at the air. It looked like a komodo dragon crossed with a gray fox. It turned narrowed yellow eyes up to him, licked its jaw, and sprung forward, claws gleaming.

Michelangelo barely had time to yell, and then pain speared him across his plastron and the world whited out.

His spiritual body fell unguarded into space.

-

Mikey became aware of himself floating in a world of whiteness, stripes of color fluttering around. He felt completely stripped and realized he wasn't in his body.

"The lair," he murmured. "I need to get to the lair. I need to tell Donnie."

The universe sped towards him and folded. Don had talked about how it worked, after they had read books about tesseracts that April had given Mikey to feed his need for fantasy. Mike opened his mind and saw the lab, saw his exhausted brother slumped in his desk chair, massaging his head.