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There is a monster in the parking lot.
Kat waves to Mae as she passes the front desk, glad to finally be off-shift. She walks outside, across the lot, and a monster lurches out of the dark, into the circle of a streetlamp, standing between Kat and her car with blood-stained fur and bright red eyes. Kat jolts with fear, inhaling—
“Please,” the monster rasps, and the scream in Kat's throat gets strangled by shock, only a short squeak escaping her.
Oh my god it talks, she thinks. Then, as the dots connect: oh my fucking god it's real , that's not a costume. Am I dreaming, is this a nightmare? Did I pass out in the break room again?
“What?” she asks eloquently, voice still higher-pitched than normal.
“Please,” the monster says again. “Help us.”
“Us?”
Something at waist-level moves into sight from behind the monster, and Kat lowers her gaze to a second creature. An alien. A child, maybe, somehow, because it's glaring at her with inhuman, pale yellow eyes, but it's dressed in a flimsy hospital gown, with one tiny hand fisted in the fabric of the monster's bloody blue scrubs, and the other holding onto a third, even smaller creature. The third alien(?) is barely awake, rubbing its eyes with a yawn.
The monster's arms shift, drawing attention back, and Kat realizes it’s more humanoid than she thought, but it’s carrying two more reptilian toddlers, one hanging onto the creature's back, and the other, the very smallest, cradled to the adult's chest.
“Please,” the monster repeats, desperation clear. “She will kill them.”
“...What do you need?” Kat finds herself asking.
“This is insane,” Mae says, pacing back and forth in the hallway, keeping an eye on the front door and an ear out for the phone. “You understand this is insane, right?”
“I told you not to freak out,” Kat says, trying to project calm she doesn't feel, as she lifts a microchip out of a child's leg. 'One', as the rat man called the oldest turtle, has been terrifyingly quiet and still, watching her cut into him with a sort of detached curiosity. He has faint scars on all his limbs that make her think, nauseously, that he may be used to it.
“I'm not freaking out,” Mae denies, a little too fast to be true. “I wouldn't've turned the cameras off if I was freaking out.”
“Uh-huh,” Kat replies absently. “Hey, you okay?”
One looks surprised to be addressed, wide yellow eyes turning toward her face before he nods.
Project Renaissance: Specimen HM/02-01, reads the plastic bracelet around his skinny little wrist. Property of the Techno-Cosmic Research Institute. There isn't a single facet of this situation that isn't fucked, Kat thinks.
“Do you want that off, once we get your leg stitched up?” She asks, gesturing to the bracelet. One hesitates, but nods again. “Alright.”
Whatever is happening here tonight, it is not, technically, in the job description for a veterinarian, even an emergency vet. And yet, Kat removes the tracking chips from One, Two, and Three without incident. Well. Almost without incident—the still-nameless rat man did have to hold Two's hands and talk the child down from trying to bite her, but the fact that Two could be rationally talked down puts him leagues ahead of her typical problem patients.
“And this is Four, I assume?” Kat asks, changing her gloves and preparing a new shot of localized anesthetic for the littlest turtle.
“That's Five,” One corrects her, voice small. “Mama caught Four.”
The rat looks pained, his pink tail curling up around the infant in his arms.
She will kill them, he said before, outside.
'Mama'. Jesus Fucking Christ.
“I'm sorry,” Kat manages to whisper.
She has the rat wash himself up as best he can in the sink, and stitches the cut on his head before taking his chip out.
“Thank you,” the rat says, when five bloody microchips and four plastic bracelets sit on Kat's tray.
“You're welcome,” Kat says. “Do you want your bracelet off, too?”
Project Renaissance: Specimen EL/08-03, his bracelet reads. Voluntary Participant.
“I… yes,” he says, holding his arm out. “Thank you.”
He's shaking.
The rat takes the turtles, the chips, and the bracelets when he leaves. They watch him until he’s out of sight, disappearing into the night with his charges.
“What. The. Fuck.” Mae mutters.
“We should clean up,” Kat says. “He said whoever is looking for him would come here to ask questions; I don't want them to find anything.”
“This is some Men in Black bullshit,” Mae replies. “Kat, if I try to talk about this with you next shift and you act like you have no idea what I'm talking about…”
She doesn't finish her sentence. Kat lets out a long breath.
“Yeah,” she says anyway. “Yeah, same here.”
~
There is a monster on the fire escape.
“Rob! Let me in!” it demands once more, in his dead friend’s voice. Rob’s palms are clammy. He doesn’t dare move. “Robert! It’s me, Yoshi; let me in, now!”
I’m going to die, he thinks. That thing is going to get impatient and smash through the window, and it’s going to kill me, and my murder will never be solved and I’ll become part of some stupid urban legend. Thank god the girls are with their mom this week— he jumps with fear when the thing outside the window raps its fist against the glass again. “Rob!”
He can see its silhouette through the curtains, its clawed hands and animal snout, backlit by the streetlights and neon signs outside his apartment building. It can’t see him, he’s mostly sure, because it keeps turning its head back and forth, trying to peek around the edges of the curtains into the darkness of Rob’s bedroom.
He stares at the window, wide-eyed, as the monster growls, and moves away. He hears metal creak as it climbs up the fire escape, toward the roof.
Rob lets out a slow breath, still not moving.
He lies there, for a little while, completely unable to fall back asleep. Not totally sure that he hasn’t been asleep the whole time.
“Shit!” he exclaims, startling again, when there’s a knock on his apartment door, just loud enough to be heard. He gets up, desperately scanning his room, then the living room, for anything that would work as a weapon.
Another knock, this one a little sharper.
No knives; he doesn’t know how to use them well enough, and he doesn’t want the monster to end up armed. Ah, beer bottle on the kitchen counter, that’ll be fine.
“I can hear you moving, you know,” the monster says through the front door, and a shiver goes up Rob’s spine. There’s a series of clicks; the lock being picked. Rob holds the bottle upside-down by the neck, swallowing his fear. “I am coming in; do not scream.”
The lock turns. The door opens. Rob raises the bottle, inhaling, and in the next second he’s being shoved against the wall with a hand over his mouth, bottle caught in the monster’s tail before it can shatter on the floor. The monster kicks the door shut behind it. “Quiet,” it hisses, still in Hamato Yoshi’s voice, its beady red eyes glaring at him. Slowly, testing, it removes its hand from his mouth.
“W-what are you?” Rob asks quietly.
It reels back as if struck, hurt flashing across its not-human-too-human face.
“I don’t know,” it answers, at the same volume. “But I need your help, Rob; you are the only person in New York who I know I can trust.”
It… can’t be.
“...Yoyo?” He asks.
The monster sighs, but it sounds fond, when it speaks.
“I told you not to call me that.”
“Oh my god.” Rob’s hands come up, hovering uncertainly around Yoshi’s shoulders. “What—how—you died! You were declared dead, Yoshi! Six years ago!”
“I…” Yoshi, if it really is him, doesn’t seem to know what to say.
“What the fuck happened?” Rob demands.
“...You were right,” Yoshi says, voice cracking. “I shouldn’t have trusted her.”
It’s an answer, and yet it really isn’t. Coming down from his adrenaline high, still confused as hell, Rob suddenly finds himself with a half-collapsed armful of white-furred ex-college-roommate. He slides his arms around Yoshi’s trembling shoulders, holding him together as he sobs.
“...What can I do?” Rob asks, out on the roof of his apartment building, when he’s gotten a little more context, a few questions answered. Only a few, though, because Yoshi and his turtle sons (and sure , Rob thinks, why not? Tonight is already so goddamn weird) are in a hurry.
“I need you to take these out of New York,” Yoshi says, dropping five pieces of blinking metal into Rob’s outstretched hand. “Tonight. As far as you can. And then I need you to make sure they keep moving. Drop them on a bus, or in a river. But you must not be caught with them, and they must not stay here.”
“She chipped you?” Rob puts the pieces together. He tucks the trackers safely into his jacket pocket, and zips it up.
“Can you do this?” Yoshi demands, rather than answer.
“I… yeah. Gimme five minutes to make coffee, and I’ll be on the road.” Rob gets up to do just that. ‘Mutation’. Animal kids. Secret labs. He shakes his head, as he reaches the stairwell door. “But you and I are gonna talk properly when I get back, got it?”
Silence answers him.
He turns back around, only to see Yoshi and all four turtles gone. “Son of a—”
~
There is a monster in the encampment.
Eric, buzzed and tired, listening to a train rattle by above the underpass, doesn't see the creature until he all but trips over it, the huddle of dark plastic shifting and resolving into a person's sleeping shape, under a raincoat.
“Shit, sorry,” Eric mumbles, moving to go around, but the sleeper bolts upright, head whipping back and forth, disoriented. Eric yelps and stumbles back, hitting the ground with a nasty shock to his tailbone. He's convinced he must be hallucinating the bright red eyes, the grungy white fur, the twitching nose and ears.
“Boys?” The monster calls out. “Boys!” It stands, fixing its eyes on Eric, clawed hands flexing at its sides. “Where are my sons?”
“I-I don't, I don't know, man, I haven't seen,” Eric stammers, crab-walking away from the rat-thing. It has a Japanese accent. Is my hallucination being racist? Eric wonders, half-hysteric.
“What's going on?” He’s relieved to hear the voice of the Professor, as the man comes around a tent. “Eric?”
“Professor,” he greets. He keeps his eyes on the giant rat. “You're seein' what I'm seein', right?”
The rat-thing still hasn't relaxed, but— oh thank god —it takes its attention off Eric, sniffing the air as it turns in a circle, scanning the area.
“Boys!” it calls out again.
“They're safe,” the Professor assures it, “by the fire.”
He nods back the way he came, and the monster is off like a shot. Eric takes one shaky breath, two, before the Professor is in front of him, offering him a hand up.
“That was, I mean, it…” Eric gestures helplessly after the rat.
“He's real,” the Professor says, which puts one worry at ease, but raises several more. “Human or not, he and those boys of his are safer here than on their own. Come on.”
Eric follows him to the bonfire, where the rat is… the rat is quietly scolding some kinda frog thing in clothes two sizes too big for it, carrying a second frog kid piggyback, the smaller one asleep on its sibling's shoulder.
“I've told you before, you boys have to stay close to me,” the rat is saying, as it takes the smaller creature off the bigger one’s hands.
“But two got cold,” the older frog(?) says, looking toward the fire, where two more kids are sitting near the metal of the drum, apparently basking in the heat.
“Then wake me up,” the rat says. “I thought…”
He doesn't finish the sentence, but the kid seems to get the gist, hanging his head.
“'M sorry,” the boy mumbles.
While the rat finishes guilt-tripping his sons into good behavior, the Professor quietly tells Eric that he met the odd family the evening before, while dumpster diving. That the Professor had given them the address of a charity store that usually had donations sitting unprocessed in the back. Had told them to come here , if they needed a good place to sleep.
“You're a saint among men, Prof,” Eric says with a shake of his head. Most people, Eric included, would've run screaming if one of those things leaped out at 'em from inside a dumpster.
The Professor shrugs, dismissing the praise.
“We have to look out for each other, out here.” He smiles. “That's all it is.”
Eric looks at the little family of monsters, huddling together by the fire.
“You say that like it's a small thing,” he says, and the Professor laughs.
~
“I followed their trackers to Lake Michigan, ma’am, but there’s no immediate signs of bodies. I assume you’ve already called for back-up; if we could initiate a more thorough search—”
“No.”
“Ma’am?”
A pause, the silence dragging on. The man on the phone breaks first. “...Ma’am?”
“It’s likely that they removed their trackers at the vet clinic you first traced them to, Mr. Brener. They could be anywhere, by now. Report back here as soon as possible; the higher-ups will want your statement.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
~
While the boys dig in the charity shop bin for more clothes, Yoshi sits on the dirty ground, and stares at his neon-lit reflection in the puddle in front of him. It’s blurry, despite the water being still; his eyesight has never been perfect, and it’s even worse now, but he can still see the white fur, red eyes, pink nose.
He looks away when Five babbles something, holding out the little stuffed dog the Professor gave him.
“Dog?” Yoshi asks. Five nods enthusiastically, his new blue baseball cap almost flying off his head.
“Gog,” he repeats. Then he points up. “Gog!”
“Ah,” Yoshi says. “No, that is a cat.” Behind a closed window, thankfully, but staring at them in a way that makes Splinter’s skin crawl. The lights are on in that apartment. They’re too visible here. He stands, scooping Five up with him. “Boys, it’s time to go.”
One, Two, Three little heads pop up out of the donation bin.
“But—”
“Now,” Yoshi says firmly, and they each take the hand he offers them in turn, climbing out and dropping back to the ground.
“...Otou-san?” One asks, on the walk back to where they’ve been camping. “Can you tell us our names, now?”
Yoshi almost stops dead in the middle of the path, but has the presence of mind to move them into the trees, a little more out of sight. Central Park isn’t exactly bustling, at two in the morning, but he doesn’t want to take chances. “You said you’d tell us when it was safe. When… when Mama was gone.”
He did say that, didn’t he. Sentimental fool he’s always been; he named each of his children the first time he saw them, and has held those names in his heart. Until now.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I think it’s time. I will tell you.”
~
“Ma’am. Where is everyone?”
“Not here yet.” The smell of smoke still hangs in the air, here, even days later. The laboratory was in a clearing large enough that the fire didn’t run wild, didn’t spread to the forest. But the building itself is in ruins. Even as the man with the gun steps from one ash-coated room into the next, the scientist throws down a cracked flask, the substance inside charred to uselessness. She doesn’t flinch at the shatter of glass.
“They’re taking their sweet time, aren’t they?” the man with the gun asks.
“I haven’t told them.”
“...What?”
A calm glance, as the doctor lets another flask slip from her fingers.
“Right now, Mr. Brener, you and I are the only people who know what happened here. My experiments are almost all gone. Our entire team is dead. If we tell them that on top of all that, we were unable to recapture five escaped specimens…” she laughs, bitter and cold. “Project Renaissance will be dead in the water. All TCRI’s funds and resources will be diverted to catching the old specimens, when we should be rebuilding.”
“Then… what…” he trails off, not sure what question to ask.
She pushes away from the counter, dusting the front of her lab coat as if that will make a difference in the level of soot and grime staining it. She steps primly over the broken glass on the floor, crushing it underheel, and stands in front of him with her hands folded behind her back.
“I intend to report EL/08-03 and the entire HM/02 batch deceased, with the exception of 02-04. I intend to tell the higher-ups that their resources will be best spent allowing me to return to work, as soon as possible. Do you understand, Mr. Brener?”
“...Yes, ma’am. You, me, and 04 were the only survivors.”
“Good,” she says.
BANG.
The man’s body slumps, his gun stolen from its holster in the blink of an eye. “But not quite.”
~
There is a monster in the alley.
Zelda freezes as she steps outside, cigarette nearly falling from her teeth. The monster standing barely two feet from her freezes, too. It has a half-smashed pizza box in its clawed hands, clearly just fished from the open dumpster. Its clothes are dirty, ill-fitting, layered in the familiar way of someone wearing everything they own rather than carry it in a bag that can be stolen.
Zelda slowly flicks her lighter on, and takes a drag, eyes never leaving the… giant mouse. The mouse’s pink nose twitches as she exhales smoke into the air.
She’s pretty sure she’s not dreaming, because her boring work dreams have never lasted an entire seven-and-counting hour shift. Pretty sure she’s not hallucinating, either, because she never has before, and there’s no history of it in her family. So: giant mouse people are real. Apparently.
“We have free slices available inside,” she informs them.
The mouse looks down at themself, then back up at her, a little helplessly. She nods.
“Once my break’s up, I’ll grab you a couple,” she offers, leaning against a clean-enough section of the wall.
The mouse-person hesitates, before nodding, clearly wary. Zelda nods back.
They set the pizza box aside and continue rifling through the dumpster, while Zelda smokes, and watches.
“What are you doing?” Brittany asks, and Zelda waves her off as best she can with a paper plate in each hand.
“Just bringing these to a guy who didn’t wanna come in. I’ll be back in a sec.”
“Thank you,” the mouse says, sliding the slices into the box with the rest of the thrown-away pizza.
“Don’t worry about it,” Zelda says, instead of blurting something rude, like: what the fuck, you can talk?!
The mouse bows their head—okay, formal. Should she bow back, or would that be weird? Before she can decide, they straighten, lift the hood of their coat, turn, and disappear around the corner, taking the pizza with them.
So. Giant mouse people are real, and they eat pizza.
Apparently.
~
There is a monster in the library basement.
Ben doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t really know if he needs to “do” anything, honestly. He’s been watching it for like five minutes, peering around the edge of a shelf, and it hasn’t… done anything monster-y. It’s just sitting on the floor in a secluded corner of the children’s section, silently flipping the pages of a picture book.
The monster is , Ben admits silently to himself, child-sized. So maybe it’s just a kid. A kid with a fucked up skin condition. And only three fingers on each hand. And a weird protrusion sticking up from the back of their red sweatshirt, that looks like a turtle shell. Totally normal human kid. Yep.
“Raph!” a young child’s voice stage-whispers, and another—oh, jeez, there’s four of them. The one that spoke, wearing an orange bucket hat, runs up to the one reading, while the other two lag behind, a taller one in a purple hoodie carrying a barely-toddler-sized one in blue. The toddler is carrying a stuffed animal that’s seen much better days. All four look like different species, but they all definitely look like turtles. Or tortoises, maybe; Ben’s never been 100% clear on the difference. “Raph, read to me!”
“No, Mikey,” the one in red grumbles. “Make Donnie do it.”
“He doesn’t wanna!”
“I don’t wanna.”
“Ughhh, Raphieee,” ‘Mikey’ whines, “please please please please—”
“Be quiet!” Raph hisses, looking around. The kid looks startled when he spots Ben. Equally startled, Ben nevertheless makes himself smile, and steps fully around the shelf so the kids can see his lanyard and staff ID. They all huddle together, hurriedly pulling hats down and hoods up to reduce how visible they are, Raph and the tallest turtle (Donnie, Ben presumes) pushing the younger two behind them. The toddler holds his stuffed animal in both hands and ducks his head down partially into his shell, which is… kind of freaky and kind of adorable.
“Hey, you kids doing okay?” Ben asks. “Are you here with an adult?”
The turtle-kids share panicked glances. Not a great sign.
“Otou-san said we could read until he gets back,” Donnie says, defiant, while Mikey peers around his shoulder with an inhumanly long neck, staring at Ben without blinking.
“That means your dad?” Ben asks, and gets four little nods. “Okay. Is he… in the building?”
“Yes,” Donnie answers, too-fast.
“Great.” Ben decides to let it slide, because he has no earthly idea what he’d do otherwise. “Let me know if you need any help.”
“We don’t,” snaps Raph. Mikey continues not blinking.
“...Okay!” Ben repeats, cheery. He walks away perhaps a little faster than he would normally, but he gets the feeling the turtle kids were just as freaked out by him as he was by them, so he doesn’t really feel bad about leaving them alone.
Their dad’s upstairs, anyway. Definitely. It’s fine.
They’re not disturbing any of the other library patrons, so it’s really none of Ben’s business, he decides.
~
There is a monster outside the bodega.
Marc doesn’t even clock it at first; his brain processes the figure murmuring into the pay phone, but he brushes past on his way inside, avoiding eye contact, ‘cause that’s just good manners. He buys a sandwich and a lotto ticket, and chats with Veronica at the register for a minute, before the old man behind him in line starts getting impatient. Marc waves the guy off, stepping aside.
Outside, the same figure is still on the phone, yelling now in what sounds like Japanese. Marc starts to walk home. A loud crunch of metal makes him turn, and he sees the phone receiver embedded in the cradle, the figure breathing heavily and pulling their hand back, shaking long fingers out with a growl.
“Dude,” Marc doesn’t mean to say out loud, but come on! Who can just do that? Punch a phone through itself??
The figure looks up, coat hood shifting and falling as it does, and Marc’s breath catches in his throat, fists clenching at his sides as his instincts prepare him for a fight. “What the fuck?! What the hell are you?”
The monster in front of him bares its teeth, settling into a ready stance. Its tail flicks behind it, ears pulling back and eyes narrowing.
“Why don’t you come find out?” it goads.
Every alarm bell in Marc’s head is telling him to back off. To get away from this thing. To de-escalate, if the monster will let him. It’s human enough to speak, to hold itself less like an animal ready to pounce, and more like a martial artist waiting for the match to start. So:
“Hey, I don’t want any trouble,” he tries, hands coming up in surrender, and the monster… Pauses. Scoffs. It turns away from him, and before Marc can blink, it’s down the block and leaping for the ladder of a fire escape, scrambling up onto a roof and out of sight.
“What was that noise?” Veronica asks, stepping outside. Marc can’t quite bring himself to answer, eyes fixed on the rooftops. “Marc? Why—shit, what happened to the phone?!”
~
“They’re expecting you in San Francisco, ma’am; we’ve arranged a private plane. Ms. Sands will drive us directly to the airport from here.”
“Good.” The woman slides into the car, settling a small, shelled figure in her lap. “Isn’t this exciting, Four? We get to fly in an airplane.”
“Airpane,” HM/02-04 echoes, dark eyes wide and curious. “Five?”
“No. Five won’t be there.”
“...Tou-san?”
“He’s gone, Four. They’re all gone. It’s just you and me, now.” A short pause, and then a click of the woman’s tongue, disapproving. “Oh, don’t cry. You know better than that.”
There is a monster in New York.
But not for much longer.