#turtles doves

Ultimately this comes second to his ongoing primary goal, and after a period of difficulty in which Sam and Lisa discuss what they're willing to do for a man who hadn't truly been a father to them all these years, Kevin ultimately passes.

(He's where Lisa got her ADHD, btw. I didn't realize it at the time of writing him, but his constant failed projects and complete absence of time-tracking skills? Textbook ADHD.)

This, understandably, wrecks the siblings for a while, but they get through it.

Then we have The Encore.

During this spate, there's a 3-year time skip/coverage, the main plot of which is Jocelyn and Raphael getting married... then discovering she's pregnant.

This seems highly unlikely, so they check again and again, and end up concluding that the mutagen is... unsurprisingly... mutating things. Not only in Jocelyn to make pregnancy possible, but in the fetus she's carrying to make it able to adapt to a hybrid gestation.

It's also discovered somewhat early by Donnie, given he still gives her monthly blood tests. In these tests he recognizes a pattern of increased HCG levels a grand total of something like 7 times, with the levels getting higher with each instance... as though her body is adapting to a series of incomplete pregnancies.

This leads Lisa and Mikey to be more careful, since Jo and Raph were NOT lmao, hence the whole deal.

At age 21, Jocelyn becomes the mother to Angelico, a little turtle/human hybrid baby boy who honestly just looks exactly like his dad, just with a few more fingers and toes. (This is partly because like, c'mon. I get it's a feature of the TMNT but turtles have 4-5 fingers and toes just like most everything with a spine.)

And then in comes... Sophie.

It's not what you think.

This is where The Dragon officially begins. Mikey is going on a solo trip through the sewers when he hears what sounds like crying, and turns out to be a little toddler turtle just like them. Shocked? So was he.

He brings her back to the lair where Jo immediately becomes Mom to her too (much to Angelico's annoyance as a 1-year-old) and the turtles begin investigating the strange new child's appearance.

It turns out that she (a girl) crawled through some even smaller drains to get there, having originated from a lab underneath a building for a company called Sacks-Khan.

If it sounds familiar, it's because it is.

After Eric Sacks was taken down, another partner rose up to salvage the company and turn it into something better: Xen Khan. Outwardly, it was a fantastic company that spent millions every year on charity endeavors.

But it's now been made clear that they still had the blood that had been drawn years prior from the turtles, and they were using it on experiments. Sophie is one such experiment.

The turtles infiltrate the location and find it's being protected by a hell of a warrior... one might say... kind of like a Dragon? Nicknamed Lóng Lián, the figure fights them for a while in full protective gear including a motorcycle helmet before the helmet is cracked and they're forced to take it off.

The turtles are given two shocks simultaneously: this is a woman (at 6'5", the same height as Leo), and... she has both long, black hair and tough green skin. She's a hybrid, half turtle and half human... but how?

After a few encounters and conversations with her, she's identified as Mei Khan, Xen's daughter, who was definitely human just a few years prior.

She was formerly a martial arts prodigy and actively participated in contests and competitions, until an accident left her paralyzed. After receiving a "radical treatment", however, the use of her legs was restored... at a cost.

This marked the first experiment using the turtles' blood, specifically Mikey's, and altered her permanently. It increased her height dramatically, returned the use of her legs, changed her skin tone and slightly altered the shape of her face, and even had her begin growing a small shell, which is seen a little bit in her art (in the link).

(A few pics for y'all.)

She remains wholly devoted to her father, which turns out to be a bad thing for multiple reasons. For one thing, Xen has been using the mutagen to change various animals, then kill them after a few years of farming more mutagen, then drain their blood and separate the mutagen and...

Yeah, bad news bears.

But the other thing? It eventually becomes apparent that he's not Mei's father.

He ended up adopting her after killing her parents out of jealousy that her mother married another man. And when Mei is given this information and confronts him... he has her captured as another experiment, resulting in the amputation of her shell for research purposes.

Yeah. This sparks a great deal of vengeance in her.

She eventually learns that her parents were originally protectors of powerful Chinese artifacts, and her real name is Mei Pieh Chi. If that sounds familiar, it was meant to. :P

The story is meant to be very ambiguous with whom she has a romantic inclination, to the point of Mei herself being constantly confused (Donnie and Leo are very flirty, both, and she's extremely inexperienced herself so she isn't sure what she's feeling).

In the end, she gets with Leo -- which a lot of people were predicting, lol.

She herself goes full vengeance and almost kills her not-dad, and ultimately results in taking him to court for damages and exposing. Jo's mother, Cecilia, represents her.

In public, Mei reveals herself and shows the extent of the atrocities having been committed by Xen, and given she is both a wounded party and the recipient of his life insurance policy... yeah.

The company is fully dismantled, the assets dissolved into the community, and Mei is awarded over 20mil directly. Guess what she puts it towards?

Her new family and their life.

She buys a massive warehouse to be their new home, of course very very quietly, and they build it into a fortress with three sewer entrances for covert excursions. She has officially joined their team as part of their little ninja clan.

Then comes The Driver.

To be honest, I think this is where my motivation started to flag, cause I could not decide on a storyline for it. I went all over the place.

Initially the character (nicknamed Pinky for having pink hair) was Kelvie, and then Alicia, being half Latina (I was thinking Puerto Rican or Dominican, at times).

Two things remained true:

She had a daughter named Chantry,

She was a mechanic with a great mind for vehicles.

Later, she evolved into a scientist in her own right and was part of the team studying Mei (by court order). Obviously, the mutagen represents an incredible resource and it's of extreme importance that they understand and contain it, lest it infect every living thing on the planet.

Though, to be honest, at this point it's guaranteed to saturate the planet eventually.

I had a brief couple of eventual ideas, including turtles from the future traveling back in time to change, fix or thwart something, revealing that in the end, all of the boys became fathers and all of their kids became ninjas and so on.

But aside from that, I didn't have much, lol.

Another tentative plot involved a different dimension which due to science opened a rift that sucked in Jo initially and then Donnie recreated the event and Raph went in to get her... it was interesting, but a little too wacky for the overall story. XD

But, there ya go. The general plot.

I have no idea where the actual story would have gone, had I continued to the end. Probably somewhere totally different. Alas, now we'll probably never know...