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Bishop's fingers trembled on his fourth cup—or was it fifth? Or the fifth pot? His laboratory and workshop, his projects, his research and experiments—all of it faded into the background, nothing as important as the little device on his desk.
Small, made of steel and copper wires, rusted at the edges—there were gears visible on the side, rhythmically clicking, and a small store-bought motor with a serial number burned off where frayed wires had charred the casing.
On the side, a small switch aligned to three different positions, one engraved with precision, two hastily scribbled in ink—on, off, and an interrobang mark. There were two prongs for a standard charging port, but no input or cord to plug it in.
In fact, one end of the wires were soldered into the prongs, the other ends held in the center of the box, stripped and splayed out like a little tree. There was the tiniest surge protector in the corner with more wires, and the gears...were connected to a plastic tube with saline solution.
He knew it was a simple saline solution--he'd uncoupled it, poured it out, analyzed it, then put it back. And the machine whirred back to life with no problem.
The wires went nowhere. The on button had no purpose. Why was the interrobang even there? And yet it sparked. The wires sparked, the prongs delivered energy, and the whole box glowed, drawing power from…somewhere.
He had studied it for hours. He had taken it apart—at least, he had tried to take it apart. But each time, the screwdriver slipped free, he shifted for a better angle, and the gears moved. The wires had new branches. The interrobang faced the wrong way.
The coffee was burned and cold. He drank it anyway. Then looked at Donatello, restrained on the laboratory table beside him.
Thick leather straps held the turtle's arms and legs in place. Bishop had meant to vivisect him, to methodically explore his living biology. But the machine carelessly tossed in the creature's duffel bag had drawn all of his attention for hours. Hours?
Donatello was watching him—eyes half lidded, the faintest twitch of amusement at the corners of his mouth. Bishop felt his skin crawl.
"You’re not going to figure it out," Donatello said softly, too calm for where he was.
Bishop clenched his jaw. "I will. I don’t know what kind of trickery this is, but I will."
The machine let out a quiet hum—so soft Bishop barely registered it—but it was enough to make his stomach twist.
“What is this?" Bishop muttered, the question more for himself than for his captive. "No circuitry, no power source—none of this makes sense.”
Donatello’s smile widened, just a fraction. “Not everything has to make sense, Bishop. But I guess that’s hard for you to grasp…for now, at least.”
Bishop turned his eyes back to Donatello, the all-too-intelligent eyes watching him from an alien, mutated form. Mutated by otherwordly influence. How deep did that influence go?
“Why don’t you tell me how it works, then?” Bishop’s voice was tight, the control slipping as his frustration mounted. “What…what is it?”
The turtle tilted his head, almost playful. “I don’t think you’d like the answer.”
Bishop swallowed, the bitter coffee threatening to rise back up. The turtle was watching him, eyes calm but alert. There was something behind that gaze—something far too knowing.
“It’s not that it doesn’t make sense,” Donatello said. “It’s just…maybe it makes too much sense.”
Bishop's mouth twisted. "What?"
Donatello smiled sympathetically, explaining as if Bishop was a child. “It follows all the rules you know. But it’s the rules themselves that are the problem, aren’t they? Too perfect. Too absolute. You want it to break down, to fall apart, but it won’t. It's wonderful. It's all so wonderful.”
Bishop clenched his jaw, feeling a slow, creeping dread begin to coil around his thoughts. "No machine can be perfect. Not without a flaw. Everything breaks."
Donatello took a breath, and his voice held all the frustrating promise of a professor laying the first foundations of a monumental theorem, something that a student would not understand for years.
"That’s what your experience has taught you," Donatello said. "A machine should let you take control of it, figure it out. But this...it follows the rules. The angles meet exactly. No hidden flaws. Every piece is where it should be. Everything is accounted for."
Bishop stared at the machine, hands twitching. “It can’t be flawless. Nothing is.”
Donatello shifted slightly, his bonds creaking but holding tight. “It’s not flawless, Bishop. It’s just…complete. Everything works the way it’s supposed to. You’re staring at it, waiting for something to be wrong, but nothing is. It’s built on the very order you rely on—there’s nothing here that should surprise you.”
Bishop’s pulse quickened. The truth in Donatello’s words twisted like a knife in his mind.
“What does it do?” Bishop’s voice was tight, the frustration mounting. “Why can’t I understand it?”
Donatello’s expression softened, almost pitying. “You do understand it, Bishop. That’s the problem. You’re trying to take it apart, but that's like taking apart the idea of its purpose. You’re looking for cracks that don’t exist, looking for the power source that's already there.”
Bishop’s hand hovered over the small machine, his fingers shaking as if the very act of touching it would reveal some deeper, hidden truth. He glanced at Donatello, strapped to the table, and for the first time, Bishop felt a hint of envy.
“You… you think you’re smarter than me,” Bishop whispered, trying to keep control. “But you're just a freak with a machine.”
Donatello chuckled softly, but his voice carried an eerie resonance. “You don’t need to be smarter to see the truth, Bishop. It’s right there. The machine, the angles…me…the whole world…we've always been there. And once you see it…you can’t unsee it. It's just…so wonderful.”
Bishop’s eyes snapped back to the device. It sat innocently on the table, humming softly, vibrating at a frequency he could almost feel in his bones.
“I don’t—” Bishop’s voice faltered. His fifth pot of coffee remained untouched. He could feel something slipping, unraveling in his mind. “I will figure this out.”
A sudden hissing noise broke through his thoughts. A vent malfunction, perhaps. He dismissed it. Unimportant. He had to solve this, pull it apart, find the angles where it connected together—
Then the room began to darken.
At first, Bishop ignored it. The lights were flickering—that happened sometimes, the government buildings showing their age. But the lights didn't flicker. They dimmed instead to a golden glow. Something was off. He blinked hard, trying to clear his eyes.
The lab door quietly fell open, revealing darkness where the hallway should have been. Smoke rolled along the floor—he tensed, standing straight, ready for a fight. He recognized the thick smoke of a ninja bomb—Donatello's brothers were here, a little earlier than expected. He adjusted his tie, waiting for the smoke to dissipate.
But the smoke didn't dissipate. It didn't spread thinner or fade. Instead it curled, expanded, creating perfect, unnatural spirals. Like fog rolling in, like darkness pushing closer, overpowering the light by its sheer presence.
Bishop stood up sharply, his focus snapping back to the present. He backed away from Donatello, from the machine, instinctively reaching for the controls to clear the room, but the rush of air to flood the lab did nothing. The smoke spread, thicker and denser with every breath he took, sweeping in straight for him.
A cold realization slid down his spine.
Donatello made these.
He should have seen shapes moving in it, figures—his captives’ brothers coming to rescue him. But no, there was nothing except the icy certainty that three monsters were hiding in the smoke and he couldn't see them, even inches away.
Bishop drew his gun. Somewhere in the haze, he heard the quiet, quick movements of someone—no, multiple someones—moving through the smoke. But he couldn’t make them out. The figures should have been clear by now, emerging from the cover, but the fog refused to obey the laws he knew.
Bishop blinked in confusion. His chest tightened with something between frustration and disbelief. He hadn’t even heard the straps being cut or the quiet, efficient teamwork as the brothers freed Donatello. The smoke finally thinned, and Bishop could see them standing there.
The first thing he noticed was Donatello, already on his feet, his brothers at his side. Leonardo's swords gleamed in the dim light, Michelangelo’s nunchaku spun lazily, and Raphael’s sai twitched in his grip like extensions of his rage.
But it was Donatello that caught Bishop’s attention—the one who had been strapped to the table moments ago. Now free, his form was calm, almost casual. And in his hand, held with the same practiced ease as one might hold a scalpel, was nothing but a simple wooden staff.
Bishop almost gagged on his indignation. After everything he had seen, after witnessing the impossible precision of the machine and the surreal behavior of the smoke, Donatello was holding… a stick?
A simple staff.
For a brief, insane moment, Bishop wanted to laugh. This was the culmination of his obsession? After studying the impossible, after watching the world bend around this creature’s designs, Donatello had chosen to fight him with such a primitive weapon?
Bishop shook his head, disbelief flooding him. “A… staff?”
Donatello spun the staff with effortless precision. "A tool."
Bishop was no longer frozen. A straight fight against these mutants was not what he wanted, not now. Not after what Donatello had given him a glimpse of. The machine, the smoke, the sheer impossibility of what they were.
He slammed his hand against the console, and the lab erupted into chaos.
Lasers crisscrossed the room, mounted turrets whirring to life and spraying the air with rapid-fire bullets. Drones buzzed overhead, their small frames packed with explosives and ordinance, primed to rain hellfire down on the intruders. Sonic disrupters pulsed with a low, threatening hum, sending shockwaves through the air designed to disorient and incapacitate. Flashbangs exploded in bursts of light, creating a disorienting cacophony that would leave any normal combatant helpless.
And then there were the mousers. A handful of them, scuttling across the floor on tiny metal legs, their snapping jaws eager to tear into whatever they could reach. Purchased from Stockman Enterprises, the mousers were his failsafe—a last line of defense that should have been enough to deal with almost anything.
The room became a battlefield in seconds, the defenses turning the once-sterile lab into a warzone.
Bishop didn't stop to watch. He ran, vaulting the control panels, pausing only at the far door to look behind himself.
Donatello moved through the chaos with practiced grace, his staff a blur as he deflected incoming fire, knocking drones out of the air and sending mousers crashing into the walls. Michelangelo deflected laser fire with impossible precision, laughing in the face of the danger. Raphael, all raw fury and momentum, plowed through the defenses like a wrecking ball, using his sai to tear apart whatever he could reach. And Leonardo—Bishop’s eyes locked on him for a moment—Leonardo moved like a ghost, guiding his brothers through the chaos like it was just another training session.
The defenses weren’t slowing them down. Not enough.
Bishop gritted his teeth, his mind scrambling for an answer, some way to turn the tide. The sonic disrupters fired, sending rippling waves of sound through the air, designed to incapacitate even the most hardened enemies. But the Turtles barely hesitated. They moved through it, their forms seemingly unaffected, as if the sound itself couldn’t touch them.
Another drone exploded overhead, showering the room with debris. Bishop ducked instinctively, trying to maintain control over the increasingly chaotic situation. He’d studied their files—knew their strengths, their weaknesses. He’d prepared for this. But none of that mattered now. None of it had accounted for this—for the way reality itself seemed to warp around them.
He should have turned and kept running. But Donatello had opened a possibility before him, a promise that Bishop only had to look and see. So he paused. And he saw.
Leonardo's blades appeared in his hands without being drawn from a sheath. The plasma bolts fired directly at him and he cut—not the plasma but the air in front of the bolts. The beams scattered as if they'd splashed against a wall.
Bishop’s breath caught in his throat. How is this happening?
But there was no time to understand, because through the cut Leonardo had made, something else emerged—pure rage, raw and red—Raphael, his sai out like two great fangs, his face all mouth and teeth.
Bishop's stomach lurched, and before he even realized what he was doing, he turned and ran.
He didn’t think—didn’t dare think.
Bishop’s boots echoed in the dark, empty corridor as he sprinted. He knew this hallway; he’d walked it a hundred times. But now, the corridor stretched on longer than it should, twisting in directions it hadn’t before.
He stumbled up a flight of stairs he didn’t remember, through a door that had never been there before. Steel beams jutted out at odd angles, their shadows clawing at the walls under the dim, buzzing lights. The railings, cold and rough under his grip, warped, slightly too high and too low. Black windows lined the walls, thick and opaque, offering no view outside.
The corridor abruptly ended in a wall of steel, imposing and seamless, barring his way forward. Bishop’s breath came fast, adrenaline rushing as he pounded his fists against the wall, each hit sending reverberations up his arms.
Then, from behind him, a voice rang out with a light, playful tone.
“Whoa, dude,” came Michelangelo’s voice, lilting with amusement. “Congrats—you actually dented the Edge!”
Bishop turned, arms spread on the wall behind him. Michelangelo was leaning against the wall, and despite the dim light, Bishop could tell he wasn’t poised to strike. No, Michelangelo wasn’t here to attack him.
“Edge?” he demanded, his voice sharp.
“Edge.”
Bishop could hear the capital letter in that word, the weight of meaning that went beyond the mundane.
“Didn’t think it was the right call, honestly,” Michelangelo continued, resting his head against the wall with an almost casual indifference. “But, y’know…Donny’s always the smart one.”
That word—always—hung in the air. That single word seemed to stretch beyond time as he knew it.
He stopped, breathing hard, his gaze narrowing in on Michelangelo. And, for the first time, he really looked at him.
Michelangelo’s face wasn’t a face at all. The grin he wore was frozen. The skin looked too smooth, too uniform, and the eyes were dark pits. His orange bandana wasn't cloth but a mere suggestion of paint blurring in and out of the air.
And he wasn’t standing in any way that Bishop had ever seen before.
One hand gripped the railing, slender fingers wrapped tightly around the metal, but another hand rested casually on the wall beside him. Yet another hand draped over a support beam as though he had been leaning there for hours, and a fourth hand was pressed over his mouth, stifling a laugh.
Bishop took a step back, his blood running cold. The shape of Michelangelo shifted slightly, the limbs extending from impossible angles, and the mask-like face tilted to one side, that grin stretching wider.
“See, Donny thought you might surprise us.” Michelangelo’s voice had a strange echo to it, reverberating through the corridor as if the walls themselves were laughing with him. “And, yeah…I think you will.”
Bishop wandered through the labyrinthine darkness, uncertain of how he’d arrived. The tunnel walls arched around him, massive blocks of stone and brickwork that felt older than New York itself. This—the candle-lit darkness, the impossible geometry that curved and twisted around him—this was their world.
The lair was dark, filled with the scent of ancient dust and melted wax. Shadows swirled as the candles flickered, casting strange shapes across the walls, and sometimes, as he studied the delicate, interlocking lines and symbols Donatello had placed before him, he glimpsed stars. Not reflections, not lights—stars, distant and cold, burning in impossible skies that hung just out of reach.
From somewhere in the distance, a low growl broke the silence. Bishop recognized it immediately. Raphael, pacing and stalking back and forth, his presence like the rumble of thunder. Bishop felt the sinking pit of hunger when the growls came too close, sometimes the hot breath through fangs touched the back of his neck as he was inspected, scented, and passed over.
And then there was himself. His reflection, or what was left of it, began to haunt him. His body no longer felt familiar, the lines and contours seeming to sharpen, glinting like glass. At odd moments, he thought he saw his skin open in tiny fractions, like windows that revealed… something inside, something deep and unknowable, like a network of lights or wires that hummed quietly within him.
“What’s… happening to me?” he whispered into the shadows, his voice wavering.
Beside him, the darkness turned. Leonardo’s shape emerged, calm and focused, his figure only half-formed, hands raised as if offering him something—hands that were like light filtering through fog.
“You’re building into something,” Leonardo replied. “An Architect, maybe. Or the doorway itself.”
Bishop frowned, looking at Leonardo’s vague form. “You don’t know either, do you?”
Leonardo tilted his head, the foggy shapes of his edges suspended in a kind of question. Before he could answer, three slender arms reached out from the darkness that he was made of, wrapping around Leonardo, holding him close. Michelangelo's grinning mask appeared, and his voice drifted through the air, rippling through Leonardo's form.
“A thought made real,” Michelangelo said, his words carrying a light, teasing note.
Leonardo sighed, a sound that almost felt embarrassed, and solidified more fully, his form becoming less ethereal, more…tangible, as if he’d been caught in an unguarded moment. He turned his head, leaning slightly into Michelangelo’s embrace, his expression—was that sheepishness?
Michelangelo’s mask tilted toward Bishop.
“Forgive him,” he murmured, his eyes empty. “He’s learning to be less…absolute.”
Bishop swallowed. “And what are you learning?”
Michelangelo’s head tilted, his mask grinning wider, as though he were amused by the question itself.
“Where the edges are,” he replied, his voice curling around the words with a softness that belied the vastness behind them.
He gestured with one hand toward the swirling, complex equations sprawled before Bishop, Donatello’s intricate mathematics gleaming faintly in the candlelight.
“Keep studying,” Michelangelo continued, an unusual warmth in his tone. “You’re advancing so fast.”
And as Bishop looked down at the equations, seeing their angles connect and turn into patterns that seemed to pulse with life, he realized he couldn’t stop. Somewhere, beneath his confusion and fear, there was a pull, something drawing him deeper, compelling him to follow the patterns, the angles, until he reached… what?
The edges snapped shut. He blinked, sitting back as if he'd been slapped. The lair was once again just a cistern beneath New York, and Leonardo was the eldest leaning against his little brother, calling Bishop to dinner.
Learning the math was the goal. But questioning the math made the other world clear away, as if everything had been a dream. He knew he had to stop doubting, to stop letting his skepticism strand him in cold reality—that would lead to madness. For now, he left his jacket and tie on the chair and joined them at the low, broken table for pizza.
"What do you think so far?" Donatello asked, his soft brown eyes wide in excitement.
Bishop paused. How could he begin to coalesce his thoughts—the terrible paradigm shift, the way the universe had expanded, how the world unlocked with geometries that made no sense until they did? He looked at Donatello, turning his head too quickly, and the world blurred—
—and another layer of reality covered this one, with clear protozoa floating through the air, a thousand cilia pushing through the walls—Bishop's eyes widened—the walls were paper thin suggestions and the only protection from shapeless things creeping along the edges of the lair like centipedes and worms, kept at bay only by Raphael's endless hunger and the sharp edges of Leonardo's silhouette.
Bishop blinked, and the world snapped back. He stared at Donatello in helpless shock.
"Isn't it wonderful?" Donatello asked, his eyes completely black, utterly in love with the mechanics of the world.
Bishop felt a thread of his mind unravel, turn to glass, shatter.