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 HEY, KID, YOU'RE 
 A LONG WAY 
 FROM NICKTOONS! 

Some TMNT stuff was always meant for grownups.

Solicit[]

Donatello confronts the mysterious new robot. Why is it motivated to assimilate hosts and what is its relationship to the Baxter Stockman Robot? Don is overwhelmed by the many unknown questions he must answer in order to defeat this major new menace.

Appearing in Donatello: The Brain Thief, part 2[]

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Minor Characters[]

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Summary[]

Donatello, pinned to the ground by the cyborg roach, watches as the end of the tendril coming towards his forward turns into a buzz saw. He tells himself to concentrate and direct his body’s energy. With that, he manages to swing his up and deliver a blow hard enough to knock the roach back, snapping off the tendril in the process. The roach shrieks and Don prepares to strike it with his fist, but it leaps at and over him. It then turns and smashes into Don, sending him flying back against a brick wall, which crashes around him.

The roach inspects the bricks and finding nothing, crawls over them to disappear into a tunnel. A moment later Donatello pushes his way up out of the bricks. He realizes the roach robot gave up because it couldn’t find him, that it was as if it lacked the higher intelligence necessary to reason that he was under the bricks. Don picks up the segment of the roach’s tendril that he’d managed to cut off. He runs back to the room where the cyborg Stockman’s body parts are laid out, noting that nothing has changed or been disturbed.

Don takes a small roach from his belt and sets it on the ground, watching it skitter over the robotic remains. He hypothesizes that the roach robot somehow achieved a sort of mimicking ability. However unlikely, he will try to trigger some kind of response by introducing a similar organic host to the remains he’d gathered. He watches the roach wander through the remains, but there is no reaction from the parts, so he finally smashes the roach with his bō.

Returning to his lab, Don checks the diagnostics he’s run on the upper half of the Stockman robot. They reveal that a human brain resides in its metal skull. He tells Stockman that the de-encryption program he ran on him worked perfectly. Sitting down at his computer, Don discovers a repair/regeneration program that is corrupted and non-functional. The central power core was affected and is now largely inoperable. He also finds the presence of chemicals suggesting a combination of nanotechnology and biotechnological molecules that could create organic replicators.

Don finds this to be incredible. The Stockman robot speaks up, saying that he noticed Don was agitated when he entered the room and wants to know what he found. Rather than answering, Don stands up and walks over to the remains. He examines it and says that whatever happened, it’s not working on him. Stockman asks if a part of him has regenerated. Don starts for the door, telling Stockman “Bite me” before continuing out the door.

Elsewhere, the roach robot breaks through a wall, sending sewers rats running. A tendril shoots out of the roach’s back and wraps around one of the rats. The rat struggles as a tiny buzz saw forms on the end of tendril and strikes its skull. A short while later, Don travels through the sewer tunnels and comes across a large, cyborg rat. He ducks back out of sight, at first thinking it’s another one, but then realizes that the organism is known to possibly assimilate hosts, so this could be the same creature he’s already encountered.

The piece from the roachbot begins to wiggle in his belt and he takes it out. It wiggles and twitches in his hand before melting into a liquid. The liquid metal falls to the floor and slides over to the rat robot. It attaches to the rat after which the rat turns to spit a blob at the wall where Don is hiding. Don is forced to dart aside as the wall crashes. The rat robot jumps at Don and tries to bite him, but the ninja jumps out of the way. He slugs the ratbot with his bō, but it turns and bits the staff in half.

Don counters by cracking the ratbot over the head with half of the staff. He then jumps up onto a short wall, but a hatch opens in the ratbot’s skull, and a tendril shoots out. Don goes higher, making his way onto overhead pipes. He turns to look down and through the open skull hatch, spots a tiny brain. Don then catches hold of an even higher pipe, swings up, and enters a sewer pipe.

Unable to catch the Turtle, the ratbot runs through the sewers and then stops under a street grate. In the alley above, a homeless man approaches, muttering that there’s nothing, that everywhere he goes there’s park and park is all there is. He takes a seat on the grate. The ratbot’s head tendril zips up and embeds itself in his forehead. The homeless man becomes expressionless and is then pulled down through the grate.

To be continued…

See also[]

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