DARPA facility in Lincoln County, Nevada



A fictional secret facility of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, located on a dry lake bed in Lincoln County, Nevada, appears as the primary setting of the final story arc of Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Volume 2.

History
In Volume 2, issue #2: Winds of Change, convicted criminal infiltrated an apparently different DARPA facility located in the mountains somewhere in the Southwestern United States, where he stole and implanted his own brain inside a cutting-edge cybernetic exo-suit. Over the next several issues he violently fled the facility and returned to New York City where he sought revenge against his former laboratory assistant, who back in Volume 1, issue #2: TMNT vs. the Mousers, had teamed with her new friends the to stop Baxter from using the s, which she and Baxter had invented together, in his own rampage of robbing banks, collapsing skyscrapers, and extorting random money from the city. DARPA forces pursued Baxter to the city to capture him and retrieve their exo-suit. In issue #8: Face Off, in the midst of the chaos of Baxter's clash with DARPA, the Turtles and, the DARPA forces found and captured and shipped him off to the Lincoln County facility to become part of their collection of mutant and alien test subjects. In issue #9: Victory?, Baxter himself was eventually captured by the Turtles rather than DARPA when he was hunted down and his exo-suit was crippled by, , and. Meanwhile, one of the tenants of the April's apartment building, former DARPA agent Louis Braunze, discovered and subdued multiple DARPA agents who had broken into the apartment shared by April, Casey and, and used his DARPA-developed psychic powers to extract information from them, learning not only their reason for being there, but also of the whereabouts of April and Casey's mutant friends that DARPA had captured.

In issue #10: Descending into D.A.R.P.A., Braunze confronted Casey about what he had learnt, and arranged a meeting with the other three Turtles to offer help them rescue Raphael, to which they agreed. Back in the facility, Raphael finally managed to break free from his laboratory restraints and wandered the facility, discovering several aliens being held in giant glass tubes. He was then attacked by a tall bipedal alien creature, and both he and the creature were subdued by the arrival of human guards. Having recruited Nobody's help as well, the three other Turtles, Casey and Braunze had snuck into the mountains surrounding the dry lake bed in Nevada.

In issue #11: The Rescue, the group assaulted and infiltrated the DARPA facility, recovering not only Raphael but freeing the aliens from their tubes, including a certain Triceraton who was one of those who like had become stranded on  during the T.C.R.I. incident in Volume 1. When the naked Triceraton recovered his clothes and his gear which had also been kept in the facility, he privately discovered that his homing beacon had already been activated.

In issue #12: The Escape, a certain increasingly-dilapidated Triceraton asteroid ship was already in space near Earth, having been following the lone Triceraton's homing beacon all this time. In the facility, the rescuers, the Triceraton, a fat alien and a thin alien teamed up to escape together, but the Triceraton secretly knew that forces were already en route to converge on the site, and he followed his own plan to prepare for their arrival, secretly murdering the fat alien in the process. As the group attempted to escape through a cave beneath the facility, they encountered a chamber with what appeared to be a predatory giant starfish. The starfish shot a harpoon that impaled Nobody, pulling him in and devouring him. Casey recovered Nobody's duffel bag, activated a timed explosive within it, and threw it towards the starfish, where it exploded and killed the creature. The explosion caused a cave-in, opening a hole in the chamber's roof. The survivors climbed out to the lake bed's surface, only to find armed DARPA forces waiting for them above.

In issue #13: The Battle, the group retreated back into the cave as the DARPA forces opened fire on them. Soon after, they heard loud booms above, and emerged again to find that the DARPA forces were themselves under attack by a Triceraton invasion. The Triceratons themselves were already badly depleted by their long voyage and found that the DARPA forces were a match for them. Realizing their defeat was imminent, the Triceratons back on the asteroid ship improvised a plan to slingshot around the Sun and suicidally crash the entire asteroid on the location of the battlefield at extremely high velocity, hoping to kill as many of their human enemies as possible in the process. On the ground, the lone DARPA Triceraton shot his weapon through Braunze's abdomen, mortally wounding him. Braunze informed Leonardo that he had psychically learnt of the asteroid ship's suicide attack. The lone Triceraton dismissed this is as a lie, proudly proclaiming that the Triceraton Republic would rule the Earth forever. But in the middle of his boasting, a falling piece of Triceraton drop ship debris fell directly on his location, killing the lone Triceraton. With the four Turtles, Casey and the thin alien still alive, the surviving alien knew of an inter-phasic cannon kept at the DARPA facility that could save them from the crashing asteroid ship, and drove off alone in a jeep towards the facility. As the thin alien was driving off, Louis Braunze appeared alive in the jeep's passenger seat, having using his psychic powers to fake his death. The alien explained that they could use the inter-phasic cannon to temporarily knock the entire Triceraton asteroid ship out of phase so that it could move directly through the Earth's surface without touching it, then come back into phase inside the Earth's molten interior where it would be destroyed. Casey and the Turtles made an attempt to escape the site on foot, but they were caught in a massive explosion.

In the next moment, Leonardo woke up on the couch in April and Casey's apartment back in New York City, and no one else remembered what had happened in Nevada, as if it had all been Leo's dream. But as Leo looked out of the apartment window onto the sidewalk below, he noticed Louis Braunze walking by and looking back at Leo one last time.