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Journal: ”peacefulpanda”
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♠ Character Info
Name: Hamato Donatello
Movie/series: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2k3
Year/Position: Senior in high school
Non/Speaking Animal/Companion(if any): None
Powers: He doesn’t have any explicit supernatural powers, but he’s a ninja, and a skilled one at that. He’s trained his whole life for the sake of his and his family’s survival, so he’s no pushover. He can and will lay out several opponents bigger and/or stronger than he is, especially if any member of his family’s in danger. Along with that, he’s stealthy and athletic. He can scale walls, jump from building to building for miles in the city, do flips in the air, and do it all completely silently. Turn your back for a moment and he can disappear, and he can stay disappeared for a while.
He is actually one of the finest minds of the world, outmatching even a Nobel Prize-winning scientist by the name of Baxter Stockman. Put a scientific problem in front of him and he will solve it.
According to the episode Space Invaders III and a few other incidents, Donatello actually has a sort of psychic connection with Splinter. Or more accurately, he’s able to connect on the astral plane with his master in times of deep peril while Splinter is meditating. If he can do that, it’s possible he can do it with his brothers… if any of them were actually capable of meditating that deeply yet. Along with that, he can meditate so deeply that he goes to an astral plane, but that’s hard for him to do.
He also has the potential to harness his chi and do crazy things like punch through rock with bare hands, run at super fast speeds, and turn into a dragon, but he doesn't actually know that yet and probably won't figure out how to do it unless given the right training from the right people, so while it's worth noting, it's probably not going to be relevant.
Canon history: Here’s a timeline and here’s a list of episodes with a brief synopsis for each. There’re no more detailed histories of just Donny.
AU history: (Preemptive tl;dr: it's canon with very slight alterations to make it mesh better with the world/be more realistic up until after the Good Genes story arc, when Donatello's recovering from a secondary mutation debacle.)
Donatello and his three brothers were hatched in a pet store in New York City. They were bought by a young boy, but while he was taking them home in a jar, a can of green ooze fell off the back of a truck at an intersection and the boy dropped them by accident. The turtles and the ooze were washed into the sewer, where a rat took pity on them and gathered the turtles up in a coffee can to take to his burrow.
The next day, both the rat and the turtles had grown twice their original sizes.
They continued to mutate, and the rat, Master Splinter, took it upon himself to take care of these little ones. Soon, the one he named Donatello started to talk, and then the others learned as well.
Knowing that the outside world wouldn’t be accepting of them, Splinter taught the turtles, his ‘sons’, how to be ninjas. Each turtle got a weapon to learn how to fight with, and Donatello chose the bo staff. The turtles grew up together in the sewer, and except for the occasional bump in the road (Donatello nearly drowned once as a child to be saved by Leonardo, the turtles had an ill-fated attempt at teaching a young human boy about fighting, et cetera), they lived safely in secrecy. Then, when the turtles were fifteen, disaster struck.
Machines called Mousers ate through the foundation of their home and the tunnels surrounding it, forcing the turtles to get separated from Splinter and needing to go to the surface. While trying to get back underground, they ended up getting involved in a heist ran by the biggest local gang, the Purple Dragons, and they thwarted the whole thing. And then they were attacked by ninjas. It didn’t make sense to them either.
They finally got back underground and found a new home with Splinter, but the whole incident brought their existence to the attention of Oroku Saki, a wealthy businessman who controlled both the Purple Dragons and the ninjas who attacked the turtles.
The creator of the Mousers, Baxter Stockman, was also under the power of Saki, but he was uninvolved with the gang activity. He, instead, was involved with using his Mousers to break into banks to steal money. He had an assistant by the name of April O’Neil who found out about this, and when he realized she knew, he sent his Mousers after her. She was chased into the sewer, where the turtles saved her life. She was officially let in on the secret of their existence, and became one of their closest human friends. (Donatello developed a crush on her, but he never acted on it and they just remained very close friends.)
They went to Baxter Stockman to avenge the loss of their home and to end his multiple bank heists. They didn’t succeed in dragging Stockman to jail or anything, but they did manage to destroy his building, leading to his part in Oroku Saki’s plans failing.
Adventures were had. Raphael met a vigilante by the name of Casey Jones-at first, he was mostly considered ‘Raph’s friend’, but Casey grew on the others, Donatello included. There were a few things that caused a bit of a fuss, like Raphael getting kidnapped by a Purple Dragon named Hun (and getting saved), the turtles needing to team up with a girl named Angel to save Casey from getting beaten to death by Purple Dragons, the homeless friends of the turtles getting kidnapped and forced into labor on a garbage island by the Garbageman (and then also being saved by the turtles), but nothing of too big consequence happened until Oroku Saki decided to approach the turtles.
Saki had a private audience with Leonardo and convinced him that they should work together, but all three of Leonardo’s brothers snuck in and eavesdropped. None were convinced, so they pushed Leonardo into consulting Master Splinter, who confessed that he knew exactly who Saki was.
It turned out Oroku Saki was actually a master ninja by the name of Shredder, leader of the Foot Clan, who had murdered Master Splinter’s old owner, Hamato Yoshi, in cold blood. Incensed that he had been tricked, Leonardo and his brothers went to tell the Shredder’s ninja that they could go to hell. This, of course, ended up with them confronting the Shredder himself. And then getting their asses kicked.
Luckily, they managed to escape before the Shredder killed them all, but they were separated. Donatello ended up with Michelangelo, who had broken his foot. After getting his little brother’s foot wrapped up and trying to hide from the Foot ninja, they were found by Splinter, who had come after them, and their brothers. They then staged a counterattack against the Shredder, where Splinter ended up kicking a water tower on his head. Figuring no one could survive that, the family finally went back home. Turned out someone could survive that.
More adventures were had, one involving investigating crystals the turtles found in their lair. They found that they were connected to an underground Foot genetics lab, where they had mutated humans into monsters. They befriended three of the monsters-Quarry, Stonebiter, and Razorfist-and in order to help them find a new power source (after having fried their last one) for their shields, they went down into an underground city where everyone was captured by a member of a long dead species that used to be dominant. The man cured the monsters of their mutations, but he wanted to make all of them-the humans and turtles-stay with him in the city. The turtles had to seal him away, but they found out that none of the humans could leave the city without turning back into monsters. Donatello promised to find a cure for them, then the turtles went back home.
Or at least they tried to.
Turned out that while they were gone, Foot ninja infiltrated the sewers in search for their lair. They and Splinter snuck out and shacked up in April’s home to wait it out. While they were there, Donatello met April’s basement tenant, Kirby, who had a crystal that temporarily brought his drawings to life. Donatello ended up going with Kirby to a dimension he had created with his crystal, and together, they saved a city under attack by monsters. Unfortunately, the portal they had used to leave was beginning to disappear, so there was only time for Donatello to get out before the portal was sealed for good. This was possibly Donatello’s first experience with real guilt and loss.
He didn’t have too much time to dwell on it, though. Soon after, the Foot ambushed Leonardo while he was on a solo training run, and they threw his beaten and broken body through the window. Turned out that the Shredder had survived, and after a massive brawl in April’s store that even Casey got involved in, the whole family (including Casey and April) only just managed to run out before the store blew up. The Shredder thought they were dead, and they went to Casey’s old country home to recuperate. It looked like Leonardo wouldn’t make it for a while there, but with the tender love and care of his family, he recovered.
After everyone recovered completely, they went to New York to kill the Shredder. It was a long and hard battle during which Stockman betrayed the Shredder and tried to kill everyone involved, but through teamwork and the help of a mysterious group of ninjas called the Guardians, the turtles were victorious and Leonardo decapitated the Shredder. (Turns out that’s survivable too.) Unfortunately, Splinter was wounded in battle and he turned up missing. Donatello fried the machines in the building, then the turtles ran.
The turtles searched through the city exhaustively for their master, but they couldn’t find him. Finally, they decided to turn their attention to the Guardians, who were the only variable during the battle that hadn’t been investigated yet. They found out that the Guardians were connected to a company called TCRI, the same company that had made the green ooze that had mutated the turtles and Splinter.
They broke in with the help of April and Casey, finding out that TCRI was actually ran by strange brain-like aliens, and they found Master Splinter in a stasis pod within. Before they could save him or get out, they accidentally stepped on a transportation pad, sending them all the way to a planet called D’Hoonnib, where they met a robot called Dr. Honeycutt, or the fugitoid, running from local army troops. They saved Honeycutt and then he saved them, and he explained where they were and what was going on. The troops that were chasing him were from the Federation, a human-like intergalactic organization bent on conquest, and they were after him for plans of a device that could make them a military superpower. This device happened to be a teleportal which, if built, could send the turtles back home.
The turtles had to find a way to get Honeycutt a quiet place to quickly make and break a teleportal, but they were interrupted when Triceratons, a dinosaur-like warrior race, came onto D’Hoonnib and kidnapped the professor. The turtles tried to save the professor and stowed away on a Triceraton ship, but it turned out that Triceratons didn’t breathe oxygen. The turtles had to resort to meditation to slow their bodies down enough to survive on what little breathable air they had and then were powerless to fight against the Triceratons when they were discovered. To be used as leverage against the resistant fugitoid, they were thrown into a Triceraton prison. Of course, they raised hell and escaped, only to be captured again and tossed into the Triceraton’s version of the gladiator games. They dominated, but Prime Leader Zanramon, the leader of the Triceratons, was furious that they won, so he sent them down with the rest of the fighter slaves, intending to pit them against each other the next day. They didn’t actually need to wait until the next day, since they ended up brawling with the slaves right down there in the quarters, but their loyalty to each other and their honor in battle won over the other slaves, especially a Triceraton slave named Traximus.
The slaves befriended the turtles and Traximus explained why he, a Triceraton, was a slave, and in the process explained a little more about the Triceratons. Apparently, he had been a player in politics that had spoken up against the Prime Leader too loudly, so he was tucked away. Triceratons were once a noble and honorable race, but with the dictatorship, their goals were less honor-oriented and more victory-oriented. This change in culture and government caused civil unrest, and there was a massive underground movement to rebel against the Triceraton government.
The next day they were pitted against each other as planned so the fugitoid would be forced to watch and be coerced into building the teleportal, but Traximus and the rest of the slaves refused, loudly defying Zanramon. The Prime Minister responded by locking away the slaves and throwing the greatest Triceraton warriors against the turtles. The turtles trounced them, jumped up to the Prime Leader’s box, and took him hostage. Because that was really the best idea they could come up with. They used him to get the guards to stand down and to get to the professor’s lab, where they convinced him to make them the teleportal so they could go home (and where Donatello accidentally revealed to Zanramon that he could just take the professor’s robot body and forcefully download the information off him).
They went to take Zanramon’s private cruiser, but Triceratons intercepted and Zanramon escaped, though the turtles still managed to steal the cruiser and fly off. Of course, fate didn’t like them actually having a stroke of luck, so the Triceratons chased them and the Federation invaded to find the fugitoid. The turtles landed on a small asteroid to try to build the teleportal, desperately stalling both sides of the war, but the Triceratons and the Federation touched down on the asteroid and started trying to get the professor/kill each other right when the teleportal was finished. The turtles and the fugitoid tried to leave, but the teleportal malfunctioned and broke. Then a big light came down from the sky and teleported the turtles, the professor, and a bunch of Triceraton and Federation troops back to the TCRI building. (Yeah, remember that place?)
Of course, the alien military troops freaked out, trying to kill each other in the middle of the building, and the brain-like aliens zapped them all back to the asteroid. All, that is, except one lone Triceraton who escaped to the sewer.
Then the brain-like aliens brought out Master Splinter, good as new, and explained that they were just saving his life. An alien named Mortu introduced himself as the aliens’ leader, and explained that they were called the Utroms. He decided to show Splinter and the turtles the history of the Utroms on Earth by putting them in pods that would link them with the memories of all the Utroms in the building. (Apparently, Utroms have a culture around being ‘one’.)
The turtles found out that the Utroms of TCRI were actually once the crew of a ship meant to capture and transport one of the Utroms’ most dangerous criminal: Ch’rell. Things were going fine until Ch’rell escaped his restraints and caused the ship to crash on a tiny island of a nearby planet: Japan, Earth. The Utroms made an exoskeleton to wander around with the humans from the scraps of their ship, one of which Ch’rell stole, and they resigned themselves to waiting for centuries for Earth’s technology to get to the point where they could make a teleportation device to go back home.
Outside of the pods, Baxter Stockman, now in a little spider robot body, broke into the TCRI building and messed with the pods’ wiring. This caused the illusion to become ‘real’ for the turtles, so they were affected by their environment.
Of course, they got to meet the Shredder’s ancestor, who also hated the Utroms and tried to destroy them all. When the illusion became real, they were nearly killed by the Shredder. The turtles tracked down the virtual Utroms for help, but when they found them, Shredder came along again. Leonardo defeated the Shredder by using his mind to control the illusion, proving to virtual Mortu that they were telling the truth about being stuck in virtual reality and activating the failsafe that brought them out.
And then the Shredder attacked the TCRI building.
A battle broke out, during which Honeycutt shorted out the program that kept Stockman obedient to the Shredder, causing Stockman to betray him and leave. The Utroms had to evacuate using their teleporter to go home, and they brought Professor Honeycutt with them, leaving the turtles and Splinter to duke it out with Shredder. During the battle, they found out that the Shredder was an Utrom. Ch’rell, to be exact.
Ch’rell set the building to explode, but the turtles and Splinter escaped in the nick of time, leading him to be destroyed with everything else. (And that happens to be survivable as well. Shredder’s bad at staying dead.)
More adventures were had! Among them being fighting off a creature made of nano bots, Leonardo getting challenged and nearly murdered by a ninja known only as the Daimyo’s son (though Leonardo defeated him and ‘shamed’ him in front of his father, so keep him in mind), and fighting a mutant crocodile named Leatherhead.
Leatherhead happened to be similar to them in that he was mutated by Utrom ooze, but he was kept by the Utroms and raised by them. He was a gentle and ingenious soul, but he retained his instinct to be a vicious animal, so he was often caught between wanting to be peaceful and his violent tendencies. Unfortunately, they didn’t have time to get him before they evacuated, so he fled to the sewers, where Stockman found him. Stockman convinced him that the turtles were the reason the Utroms left and that he had to destroy them, but in the end the turtles made him realize that they were the good guys. The tunnel they were in began to collapse and Leatherhead saved them by holding up the ceiling long enough for them to escape, though everything collapsed on top of him.
Afterwards, Donatello finally made a breakthrough with the crystals. (Remember those? The ones involved with the underground city and those mutant humans?) He had been working on the problem since he promised everyone in the underground city that he’d save them. He had a dream that told him to ‘listen’, leading him to realize that the crystals dissolved with certain sonic waves. He had found a cure for the mutation.
The turtles immediately went to the underground city, only to find that the Crystal Moon, the massive crystal in the cavern that powered everything (including the crystals that kept the humans not mutated) was gone and that everyone had turned into mindless monsters. Donatello managed to administer his cure to Quarry (now Sydney), who turned back to her human self. She explained that everyone had gotten impatient waiting for Donatello to bring a cure, so they tried to blow a piece off the Crystal Moon to work on themselves. They managed to dislodge the Moon entirely and it fell into the lava, making them revert to monsters.
Donatello drew up a plan to get the Moon, but it was tricky. It involved tunneling into the lava and hooking the Moon up to a cable with only their tunneler’s heat shields. He and Quarry nearly died, but at the last minute, they succeeded and tunneled their way out of the lava. Donatello gave everyone the cure and the turtles personally took their newly not-mutated friends to the surface, where they could finally return to the lives the Foot had stolen from them.
Unfortunately, all was not happiness and sunshine. You see, Shredder was a power player in organized crime, and his leadership was what caused the Foot to practically rule criminal New York City. With him gone, the Mafia, the Purple Dragons, and the Foot all were squabbling over his turf. It broke out into a massive turf war for which the turtles were partially to blame. Leonardo, wracked with guilt, went out to try to help in some way. Donatello and Michelangelo decided to help him because they understood where he was coming from and didn’t want him to get into a situation he couldn’t get out of, at least not alone, and then Casey got in on it because he’s both a vigilante and their friend. After joining them for a while, Raphael blew up and refused to help anymore, declaring that it wasn’t their fight.
After their first couple fights with mobsters, gang members, and Foot Elite, a woman belonging to the Foot showed up. She introduced herself as Karai, and she was the adopted daughter of the Shredder and the leader of Japan’s chapter of the Foot. She had come to put an end to the turf war and to take her father’s place. She offered to make a deal with the turtles, asking them to help her end the war by being her backup plan, and in return, the Foot would not seek revenge against them for killing the Shredder. They agreed.
…And they managed to nearly die, but last minute, Raphael and Splinter jumped in and helped turn the tide of the battle, helping Karai put down the mobsters and to knock the New York City Foot Elite down a few pegs until they swore fealty to her. Karai promised to hold up her end of the bargain, but on the sly, she was repairing Ch’rell’s body with alien creatures, and he was determined to get revenge.
And then, you guessed it, more adventures were had. Short ones, though, like finding the Garbageman (remember him?) at the bottom of the river sinking freighters and saving a sports trophy important to Casey from a bunch of roughnecks.
The turtles came across that one missing Triceraton from the group that got teleported in the TCRI building (yeah, do you remember him also? Protip: remember everyone, no matter how minor). He had been walking around the sewers, but his face mask got cracked, causing him to lose air and forcing him to breathe oxygen. Now, Triceratons live off of nitrogen and sulfur, not oxygen. He was breathing poison, poison that caused him to hallucinate and have delusions. He thought the turtles were commanding officers, but Donatello, seeing how much he was suffering, ignored Raphael’s protests and tried to patch up things a bit so the Triceraton, Zog, could have a tube leading to a proper portable air supply. It wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t dying.
They were then attacked by a Foot mech in the likeness of Master Splinter, which Zog made short work of, but they decided to counterattack. The Foot were working off a boat, and the turtles found them, splitting up with the intent of making the boat go out into the river and blow up. Of course everything went to hell and they nearly died, and Karai couldn’t make herself kill Leonardo, and Shredder went down with the ship (and survived yet again), and Zog bravely sacrificed his life so the turtles and Splinter could live.
More adventures! This time involving magic puzzle boxes that sent the turtles and April into another planet where giant hornets kept trying to kill them and managing to get mixed up with the Justice Force, a bunch of superheroes Mikey idolized. Along with this, the Mist started in on the world, but the threat of the Mist seemed rather minor at the time.
Then, like he had been doing every three years, Splinter left the lair for a few days, leaving only instructions for the boys to not get into too much trouble while he was gone. The turtles, being a curious lot, decided to follow their master and discovered he made a portal to another planet. Of course, they followed him. And ended up getting in a fight with a bunch of stick people, beating them. Then they ran into Splinter, who was very disapproving about the fact they had followed him, but a friend of his, a giant four-armed creature, was excited as all hell to be able to explain stuff to them, which he did.
This planet was called the Battle Nexus, where warriors from all across the universe came to fight each other in a tournament, and whoever won would be crowned the greatest warrior in the universe. In the last tournament, Master Splinter had won (defeating a dragon-like being called Draco-keep him in mind) like his Master Yoshi before him.
Then the Ultimate Daimyo, the head of the Battle Nexus, appeared, revealing that not only was he an old friend of Splinter, but he was also the father of the ninja who had attacked Leonardo without provocation way back when (do you also remember him? You probably don’t, since you’re trying to remember half a dozen seemingly minor villains and characters). The Daimyo forced his son to apologize to Leonardo and his family, which they accepted, and after some hesitation, Splinter allowed that his sons be entered into the Battle Nexus Tournament.
Almost immediately, Leonardo got attacked by assassins when he was away from everyone else because the Daimyo’s son had some real problems with admitting to defeat (and thus held one hell of a grudge). A humanoid rabbit called Miyamoto Usagi (another contestant in the tournament) came in and helped him out of the situation, but Leonardo didn’t have a chance to investigate. The tournament began.
Oh, also, Traximus was there. Remember Traximus? Of course you don’t. He was the only Triceraton slave in the Triceraton gladiator games, and he explained that in the confusion the turtles caused, he and the other slaves were able to escape. Now he was in the Nexus as a contestant.
Donatello was the first turtle out, a fact he lamented because he expected that his brothers would never let him live that one down. He spent his time watching the rest of the tournament, though, and saw that Master Splinter willingly bowed out of the competition when he was pitted against Michelangelo, preferring that his sons be able to have a fair chance at winning instead of trouncing them. That, however, wasn’t the most interesting battle.
Usagi and Leonardo were put against each other, a fact they had predicted but that they didn’t regret, both of them deciding that they could fight a proper honorable battle while still remaining friends. The Daimyo’s son, unknown to anyone but his councilor, had different plans, though, and shot a poison dart at Leonardo in the middle of the battle. Donatello (and everyone else) was treated to the sight of his brother collapsing with no visible wounds in the middle of a battle with a random contestant, and Donatello, understandably, flipped.
The match was nullified and Usagi insisted on being allowed to take Leonardo to the grand healer, but Donatello jumped down from the observer’s box with his weapon at the ready and demanded that Usagi get the hell away from his brother, thinking that Usagi was the one to hurt him. Donatello couldn’t stop Usagi from coming with them to the healer, but he didn’t let him touch Leonardo.
The Daimyo’s son and his councilor launched an assassination attempt against the Daimyo, nearly killing him and framing Splinter for the attempt. Around this time, both Traximus and Raphael were knocked out of the race, leaving only Michelangelo. With the Daimyo dying, the healer practically forgot about Leonardo, leaving a flailing Don to try to help his brother. (It was at this time that Donatello got a fuller perspective on his role as a doctor as well as an engineer, since he realized that there would be times when just rudimentary knowledge of science and first aid wouldn’t be enough if Splinter wasn’t around. From this point, he started taking that part of his role a lot more seriously and started learning medicine more in-depth.)
Usagi figured out what was wrong and gave Leonardo medicine to help, somewhat earning a bit of Donatello’s trust, and then the assassins came back to try to finish off the Daimyo, knocking out all the guards and the healer on the way. Usagi and Donatello had the fun of trying to single-handedly protect both Leonardo and the Daimyo against scores of assassins. Luckily, Leonardo woke up during the battle and joined in, helping drive back the assassins entirely. During all this, Raphael and Traximus saved Splinter from the Daimyo’s dungeon, Michelangelo got to the final battle, and the councilor helping the Daimyo’s son revealed himself to be Draco, that dragon that Splinter had defeated in the tournament years ago. Both Draco and the Daimyo’s son were after the Daimyo’s war staff, an extremely powerful artifact. Battle broke out involving everyone, and the battle spilled into the final battle of the tournament, where Michelangelo was. In the struggle, Draco got hold of the staff and accidentally ripped open a portal leading to a black hole. Oops.
Draco and the Daimyo’s son ended up getting pulled into the portal before the Daimyo (now well enough to walk with the help of Splinter) got his staff back and closed it up. And by accident, Michelangelo knocked out his opponent in the battle, leading to him becoming Battle Nexus Champion.
And then they went back home.
But guess what? The turtles never get any downtime.
Remember the Triceratons? Yeah, well they tracked down the teleportation residue from the Utroms to Earth, thinking that Professor Honeycutt was still there. He wasn’t, actually, but they didn’t know that. The aliens invaded New York City and demanded to speak to the world leaders, but since the Mist had shorted out communication to the outside, they only got the president. Of course, the president had no idea what the hell they were going on about with fugitoids and teleportals and terrapin creatures and such. The Triceratons attacked the city, capturing Casey and April. The turtles broke them and the rest of the humans out, but Donatello was captured when he was saving April.
Donatello was taken to the mother ship to be interrogated personally by Zanramon. He wasn’t treated well. In the face of death threats and torture, he refused to tell them anything other than that the fugitoid was no longer on Earth. When they couldn’t get where he was out of him, they forced a mind probe on it, which basically forcefully wrenched out his whole past and displayed it on a screen. That happened to be a very painful, invasive, and potentially fatal process, by the way.
Donatello focused all his mental strength and reached out spiritually to Splinter, who lent him his strength, and Donatello destroyed the probe before it could tell the Triceratons where Honeycutt went. This just got Zanramon angry, and he threatened to pulverize all of New York City, since he knew that Donatello’s brothers were in there.
That got a reaction.
It was the one threat that Donatello responded to, but his response was less ‘okay here’s where the fugitoid went’ and more ‘you have to believe me here why don’t you just scan for his presence or something’. He convinced the Triceratons to do a simple scan for the fugitoid, then his brothers were captured in the Triceraton mothership and all four of them were sent off to be tortured. Donatello was ready to scold his brothers for their carelessness in trying to save him, then it turned out the guard that had ‘captured’ them was actually an ally.
The turtles, when they had found out Donatello had been captured, immediately hijacked a Triceraton craft and infiltrated the mothership, teaming up with the rebellion that Traximus was leading. One of the rebels disguised himself as a guard and ‘captured’ them, and now they were making a break for it.
And they, of course, decided to steal Zanramon’s new personal cruiser. Again. Because fuck Zanramon.
After a certain amount of fancy flying and the Triceratons completing their scan for the fugitoid (and finding that he wasn’t on Earth), they survived and the Triceratons left Earth.
Then, almost immediately, Honeycutt came back to help Earth with the Triceratons. Because fate loves fucking with the turtles. And Donatello is never allowed to have recovery time.
This, of course, attracted the Triceratons again. Honeycutt had already erased the teleportal plans from his hard drive, so he tried to offer himself up to the Triceratons to convince them to stop fighting the Federation, but the turtles refused to let him get captured. Then they got captured, only by human military.
Bishop was the head of a secret anti-alien division of the government, and he had taken special interest in the turtles. He gave the professor to the Federation and prepared to dissect the turtles, revealing in the process that he had Leatherhead (remember him? Of course you don’t) as another test subject. Luckily, Splinter, April, and Casey jumped in last minute and saved the turtles, driving off Bishop and saving Leatherhead in the process. They all then went to get the professor.
He was already hooked up to Federation equipment, and when the Federation discovered that the professor really didn’t have the teleportal plans anymore, he tried to upload a virus to the Federation mainframe. He failed at first, but when the turtles (plus Splinter, April, Casey, and Leatherhead) broke in, he convinced Donatello to turn all the computers on to let him upload the virus properly. Unfortunately, as he and Donatello had predicted, his robot body wasn’t built to handle that kind of power and shut down after uploading the virus.
The virus spread from the Federation mainframe to Federation ships, then to Triceraton ships. Zanramon ordered his soldiers to attack the Federation while they were down and leave the stranded scouts to die, all of which went right in the face of a Triceraton’s idea of honor, and this lent them the catalyst for the rebellion to rise and knock Zanramon off his throne, placing Traximus as leader and bringing back the republic. This caused the war against the Federation to end, and both the Federation and the Triceratons left Earth.
Adventures were had! Adventures involving dealing with alien hate mongers, trying to take care of an emotionally unstable Leatherhead, encountering Karai bots (robots built like Karai), duking it out with a Cthulu monster thing, discovering that Professor Honeycutt was actually alive on Donatello’s palmtop, going back to the underground city and destroying it, and helping save Karai from Bishop. Lots of fun adventures that would take forever explaining. Among them was a very random adventure where an apprentice timestress (a girl apprenticed to Lord Simultaneous, a lord of time stationed on a far off planet) stole the time scepter (a scepter in charge of time and space with untold amounts of power) and randomly dropped on top of the turtles while they were minding their own business, having a water fight. This ended up with them in medieval Europe, trying to get said timestress and time scepter away from a demon sorcerer out for revenge against Lord Simultaneous, who had banished him to that distant time period. And that ended up with the sorcerer’s pet dragon turning out to be Ultimate Draco. Confused yet?
Ultimate Draco was the product of the Daimyo’s son and Draco being sucked into the black hole way back during the Battle Nexus tournament. They had been spending eternity in a pocket of space, fusing together into one being, until they broke themselves out and searched for the time scepter in order to get revenge on the turtles. Lord Simultaneous showed up and banished the demon sorcerer, Savanti, to the crustaceous period and sent the timestress, Renet, and the turtles back to their original time and places, but Ultimate Draco got away with the scepter.
Soon afterwards, Ultimate Draco showed up in the turtle’s lair and sent the entire family to different spots in time and space.
Donatello was sent to what could have been thirty years in the future or another planet with suspiciously similar circumstances to Earth; he was never sure. The Shredder had taken over completely, and before Donatello understood his situation, he was attacked by soldiers. Then he was saved by Michelangelo.
Michelangelo was missing an arm, which was the first thing Donatello noticed, but Michelangelo angrily blew off any questions and accused Donatello of abandoning him and the family. In this time/world, Donatello had been missing for thirty years, and everything had gone to hell.
Michelangelo explained the situation while they ran away to the park. It was thirty years in the future, the family had fallen apart without Donatello, and Shredder ruled supreme. He showed Donatello Master Splinter’s grave without warning, causing Don to break down for a bit.
After Donatello made it clear he fully intended to fight the regime, Michelangelo agreed to take him to April, who was in charge of the rebellion.
April was overjoyed to see Donatello alive, but the joy was dampened when he asked where Casey was. He was dead. Then he saw Hun and Stockman-both thirty years older, fused together as a punishment from the Shredder, and both working for the rebellion. He asked April to gather Raphael and Leonardo, which she agreed to.
Raphael was missing an eye and Leonardo was blind. As soon as they met each other when going to meet April, they were ready to duel to the death. Right before they attacked each other, Donatello came in, knocking them both down and trying to talk sense to them. He managed to pull together the frayed and broken pieces of his family and got them to agree to giving defeating the Shredder one last shot.
He spent days, maybe even a couple weeks, working on modifying a captured Karai bot to serve their purposes. He lost track of time and wouldn’t be able to tell anyone exactly how long he was there. Finally, the family attacked Shredder in his stronghold.
Hun, connected to Stockman, immediately tried to go back to the Shredder and begged to be allowed to serve him again, but the Shredder responded only by crushing them both underfoot. Then Michelangelo was overwhelmed by Karai bots and killed. Then Leonardo, momentarily distracted by a Karai bot, was stabbed in the back by the real Karai, killing him almost immediately. Raphael, completely and utterly enraged and grief-stricken, attacked Karai, but she easily bested him too. Raphael died crying out for Leonardo and his dead body fell so his arm was draped on his brother. Then April killed Karai. All this happened right in front of Donatello.
Donatello, well and truly furious, managed to obliterate the Shredder. That only left him, April, and the bodies of his family and enemies alike. Black Mist began to creep in, but Donatello wasn’t in a state to notice.
He was in shock and deeply traumatized, but before he had a chance to grieve for his fallen brothers, he was phased away from that place, staying only long enough to hear April tell him that there’s always hope, no matter what.
Then he, regular!Raphael, and regular!Michelangelo were all teleported from their respective places in time and space to see Splinter grappling with Ultimate Draco for the time scepter. Donatello immediately glomped his brothers, jabbering about them being young and alive and Mike having both arms, and he managed to confuse them deeply. Then everyone was distracted by the fact that they needed to get Master Splinter and stop Ultimate Draco. (See Personality section for more detail on Donatello’s reaction to the whole mess.)
Then, luckily, the time scepter decided to set things right and dumped everyone into the Battle Nexus before tearing apart Draco and the Daimyo’s son, then turning them to dust. Lord Simultaneous showed up and explained the whole situation to everyone, but when he saw the Daimyo, who was in deep grieving for his son, he revived the Daimyo’s son as a small child to demonstrate the good powers of the scepter. Then he sent everyone back home.
And before Donatello got a chance to process his trauma and maybe confide in Splinter fully what happened, Splinter was kidnapped by Bishop, who wanted his DNA. The turtles plus Honeycutt and Leatherhead went and saved Splinter, but not before finding out Bishop’s plans to raise an army of clones to purge aliens from the world.
And then the Shredder decided to leave Earth to destroy the Utroms. The turtles couldn’t let that happen, so they, Splinter, and Honeycutt (with help from all their friends) fought their way onboard the rocket just before it launched. They all fought long and hard, but the Shredder, with Karai’s help, defeated them. He was about to kill them before a malfunction separated them for a few minutes, when the dying family all agreed that, if they were to die, they’d take Shredder with them. Donatello was the one who told Honeycutt to overload the rocket’s power core so the ship would explode, and he was the one to plug the professor in. Moments before they all actually died, though, the Utroms jumped in and put time into stasis temporarily, just so they had the time to grab everyone from off the ship.
Ch’rell was tried by an Utrom court, and was found guilty of numerous war crimes. He was banished to an ice asteroid and the family was sent back home. April and Casey brought them to Casey’s country home to rest, but there was very little rest to be had, between things like Casey’s cousin coming in with gang members, saving merpeople from radioactive power plants, and helping alien women wrest control from dictators (the alien woman challenging her leader to a fight for rule was, by the way, the object of one of Donatello’s crushes). Their physical wounds healed, but not all emotional ones, especially not Leonardo’s. Leonardo started down a spiral of anger and moodiness.
Then they all went back to New York, where Leonardo became increasingly moody and pushes his brothers harder in training. They fought monsters-monsters both tragic and horrible, along with Hun, the Purple Dragons, and a small-scale staged alien invasion by Bishop-and Leonardo began to fall apart. Even a visit from Usagi couldn’t soothe him, and Donatello sat back and worried about his brother until Leonardo snapped during training, ending up wounding Master Splinter.
Splinter sent Leonardo away to the Land of Dragons, where he stayed for two months. In that time, Donatello (and everyone else, really) never got used to the idea that one of the turtles was missing. Things didn’t feel complete without Leonardo.
And then, of course, the lair was attacked by Karai out for revenge for the Shredder. Everyone was separated and Splinter was wounded, so Donatello took his father to their submarine and tried to dive their way to safety. They managed to escape right before the Foot blew up the sub, but Donatello had to swim with Splinter to safety and carry him away to tend to his wounds. He and Splinter were holed up like animals, Donatello being the only one capable of defending them, and they had no idea where Raphael and Michelangelo were, or if they were even alive.
Luckily, Leonardo, having come back to New York, found them and gathered up the entire family from across the city. They found a new place to stay, and after Leonardo went to Karai to tell her to back the hell off or else, they tried to put their lives back together.
Then there was a mutant outbreak caused by Bishop’s staged invasion.
The turtles decided to try to fight the mutants and find a way to contain and cure them, though Donatello got a nasty gash from one of them. As they fought and had adventures (involving more time/space travel and dealing with Stockman’s new rotting body), Donatello became progressively more sick, until he finally became too ill to fight. Casey and April were looking after him when the illness reached crescendo, giving him a secondary mutation. He had been infected by the outbreak.
The turtles and Leatherhead managed to capture him, but he was a thoughtless beast and Leatherhead said that he just couldn’t find a cure in time for him. At a loss without Donatello, the family decided to broker a deal with Bishop for a cure. They had to make sacrifices and steal a pendent from Karai in exchange, but they did so gladly for their brother. Through Stockman and Leatherhead’s work, a cure was found, Donatello was fixed, and all the mutants were changed back to normal.
Unfortunately, this was when the Mist really started rolling in. The mutation had taken a lot out of Donatello and he needed recovery time, which he wouldn’t be able to get with Strangelings and Mist around, and his family was very worried that the Strangelings would prey on Donatello’s weak state and trigger a relapse (what they should have worried about was the Mist possibly forcing Donatello to face all the trauma that had built up since the Ultimate Draco incident at once and it being too much for him). Donatello insisted that he had to be out there to help his brothers and working on a way to beat back the Mist in his lab, while his family kept trying to keep him resting, since all the agitation wasn’t doing anything for his physical or mental recovery.
Then he received an invite from the Disney Academy, which was strange because they didn’t even know Disney Academy knew they existed.
On one hand, the concept of going to an actual school would usually make Donatello overjoyed, but on the other, he was too concerned about his family to think about considering the opportunity in front of him. His brothers, however, all encouraged him to go, since Disney Academy was safer than New York City and he’d be able to recover before returning to them. After some hesitation (Splinter never liked having any of his sons far away), Splinter agreed and told him he should go. With his whole family behind him, Donatello decided to go, but for different reasons than one would think; yes, the idea of education was wonderfully appealing, but he also didn’t want his family to have to worry about him while they were busy taking care of New York; as well as that, he thought that he would have better materials and tools to work with at the Academy in order to figure out the Mist. He fully intends to throw himself into finding a way to get rid of it.
Personality: The first thing you know about Donatello is that he’s the geeky brother, emphasis on brother. He’s spent his whole life being almost exclusively with his family, and his personality has developed according to how he relates to them. He is the gadget guy, the smart one, the healer, and the gentle turtle. There’s more to him than just his role in the family, but sometimes that’s difficult to remember.
Make no mistake, he enjoys his role. Growing up, he loved fiddling with electronics, and as he grew, he was able to build things. He’s easily one of the finest minds of his entire generation, besting even the renowned scientist, Baxter Stockman, on several occasions. Even so, he doesn’t let it inflate his ego to ungodly proportions and always remembers his responsibility to his family, and that responsibility is to keep things running smoothly on the home front. He needs to make and repair the technology they need to survive, from basic things like heating to complex networks of alarms and defenses that keep their home safe. Not only that, but if his brothers are sick or hurt and Splinter isn’t there to help, he’s the one who takes care of them. Even more so, as the series goes on, he becomes the first person to turn to when someone’s hurt. Next to Leonardo’s role as leader, it’s one of the biggest responsibilities in the family with the most consequences if he screws up, and he knows that. He’s responsible enough to be trusted with the role.
He loves his family more than anything and would lay down his life for any of his brothers without hesitation. He’s fiercely loyal to them, and not only that, he’s fiercely loyal to anyone he considers a friend. Friends are few and far in between for his family, so when he finds someone who doesn’t immediately run away and/or try to kill him, they’re treasured. Once he’s well and truly made friends with someone, if you mess with them, you mess with him.
That’s not to say he’s violent. On the contrary, he’s easily the most gentle and passive turtle, and he’d rather talk through a problem calmly and politely than to fight, but because of his lifestyle, he rarely gets a chance to talk before fighting. It’s a fact he regrets since he’d really rather be a martial pacifist, but he understands the necessity of violence for survival, and he’s willing to turn to it for the safety of his loved ones.
Basically, Donatello in a nutshell: ungodly smart, kind, gentle, and loyal.
Of course, no Donatello personality section would be complete without mentioning the incident with Ultimate Draco (Same as it Never Was) and the effect on him. The incident illustrated to the audience and, more importantly, to him exactly how important he is to his family. Without him around, everything falls apart, and not just machines like he probably previously thought. With all the extreme personalities in his family, he’s the quiet but essential buffer that makes it possible for them to live with each other. The development he got from realizing that is subtle and can be up to interpretation. The following is my interpretation.
He never really had a chance to sort through his feelings about the incident. Almost immediately after he was pulled out of that world, he had to battle Ultimate Draco, and then when they got home, Splinter was kidnapped by Bishop, and then the family went up against the Shredder and nearly sacrificed their lives to destroy him. Instead of legitimately coping, he buried the memories and did his best to keep from thinking about them. Growing up in the family he did, he doesn’t feel completely comfortable opening up about any trauma he may sustain throughout their adventures-his family tends to be very rough and tumble, and the instinct is to suck up emotional wounds and keep on chugging.
He and his brothers don’t usually articulate their feelings to each other, content to show instead of tell. This system usually works just fine for them-who needs to be told that you love them when you scour the city and risk life and limb to save them when they disappear for a bit?-but it breaks down when something like the Ultimate Draco incident happens. Donatello couldn’t bring himself to reach out for the support he needed, so his brothers never gave it to him. This makes him more introverted and it’s made the issue even harder to talk about. It’s also made him take his role in the family much more seriously, seeing as he’s witnessed first-hand the consequences of his absence or failure. He appreciates his family more, but I imagine that the whole experience makes him feel isolated whenever he thinks about it since he’s used to dealing with things together with his brothers, and this is one thing he thinks he should deal with alone. It was an extremely traumatic experience, plain and simple, and he’s never gotten the chance to properly work through it.
Something else worth mentioning is the fact that he acts as a quiet source of strength and hope for his brothers. He’s the smart one, the brother with all the answers, and he has a general philosophy of succeeding in the impossible. Even if he thinks he’ll fail something, he’ll try it anyway and put his all into managing it. That helps his brothers more than he knows, or knew, seeing as he saw what his absence did during SAINW. He’s quiet and gentle, but he’s determined and will never quit, especially when a loved one hangs in the balance.
Greatest Fear: Failing. Seems pretty run of the mill, right? Well, it’s more than just an idea that he should be flawless or his ego at work-it’s knowledge of the consequences.
Donatello, next to Leonardo, has the most important job in the family. At times, it’s more important. He’s the doctor and technician, the only one who can keep the home secure and help his aging father heal his brothers. If he screws anything up with either of those jobs, his entire family could pay the consequences. Failing his family and having someone mutilated or dead because of it is a nightmarish concept for him.
After the incident with Ultimate Draco, his fear became a lot more concrete. Not only does he need to be there as a healer and an engineer, but he needs to be there to keep the family together. It just doesn’t work without him. He’s terrified of his family breaking somehow and somehow being at fault for it.
Along those lines, he's terrified of the concept that he left his brothers in that world. Something happened that made him abandon them, and he doesn't know what it was, or if it'll happen in his timeline. What Donatello's good at is thinking, and he can't just let a mystery lie. He's contemplated how and why he wouldn't return to his brothers, and if it was because he was dead, how and why his brothers wouldn't be able to find his body. Did something happen to sever his ties to his family? Is he less loyal than he thought? Is he doomed to die a mysterious death and leave his brothers to fall apart? Is he going to just leave them one day? The questions haunt him, and while he's gotten a lid on it for now, the Mist would blow the doubts wide open again.
Not only that, but he’s afraid of being alone. Not necessarily in a physical sense-he’s a solitary person and can tinker away alone in his lab happily-but spiritually. He’s afraid of losing his family somehow and being left alone as the only one of his kind. He and his brothers are so close that the idea of being left behind is unbearable. Moreover, just the idea of even one of them dying is devastating-there’s the sense that, if any of them are going to die, they’ll all go down together. No one should be ahead or behind the others.
Has your character been at the Academy before/ does your character remembering being at the Academy before?: Nope to both.
What are you plans with this character?: I feel like Donatello got the short end of the stick (pun not intended) in the show. He was developed, but any change in him was really subtle and he was often pushed to the side to be used as a tool for the plot instead of a character. I want to take the opportunity the show missed and use the nearly non-stop trauma he’s been dealing with for the past year and a half or so to explore and change him. I want him to grow up and develop an identity outside of his family.
♠ Writing
Third person writing sample:
There was little that Don disliked more than being cooped up inside while the Black Mist rolled onto campus.
He couldn’t be particularly useful if he ran from the very thing he was trying to unlock the mysteries of, could he? But he still worried. Not about himself, but about everyone else.
So he meticulously checked every floor of his dorm. One would think that it would be hard to check on every single person without actually being seen, but he was a ninja. He was used to this. He made a mental checklist of every room, and finally seeing that everyone else was safely inside, he was finally ready to go back to his own room. Too bad he wouldn’t be staying there long.
He pushed the door closed behind him, scanning his room for a second. The place wasn’t the neatest, but he knew where everything was. He pulled his duffel bag from the ground and rested it on his bed, putting in various instruments barrowed from the lab meant to help him examine the Mist, to maybe even get a sample of it (or if he was (un)lucky, a Strangeling). Finally, he picked up a small light from his desk, turning it on experimentally. It was extremely bright, but there was something soothing about it. It was what humans had dubbed a ‘happy light’, and he hoped it’d be able to take the edge off the Mist’s effects long enough for him to do his work.
Donatello turned the light in his hands, frowning. He had a theory that Strangelings fed off of negative feeling. Maybe that was what the Mist in general did. If he was correct, stemming the flow of his negative emotions should leave the Strangelings without anything to take from him, and thus make them lose interest. It was dangerous to stake so much on just a theory, but he had to find out about the Mist. He had to save his family.
He turned it off again before placing it in the back, zipping it up, though he didn’t immediately leave. Instead, he sat on his desk, examining a few pieces of paper that, at first glance, seemed to just be more pages of scribbled notes. But this was something different.
It was a letter to his family. There was at least a page for each of his brothers and his master, plus a general message for all of them. As exciting as this place was, it ached a bit to be so far away. Sending letters to them and reading the ones he received in return always took the edge off his homesickness.
So he took the time to finish off his letter. It took roughly fifteen minutes-every time he was almost done, there was something else to say-but it soothed him. His family was out there, and no matter how far away they were, he would always have their support.
After he was done, he capped his pen, leaving the letter on the desk and grabbing his duffel bag, checking to make sure his bo was on his back where it belonged. The feeling of love combined with the happy light would carry him through whatever he saw in the Mist. Even if he couldn’t see them, his family was there
He opened up his window, perching himself on the sill, and jumped down to the ground.
First person writing sample:
[Donatello turns on his communicator at his desk, various beakers and vials and tools laid out in front of him. He’s in the middle of tinkering with something or other-it was probably Mist related.]
I’m starting to hit a bit of a wall with working on the Mist. There’re a lot of variables to test out, and I don’t have enough facts. I was hoping people with more experience could help me out.
[He rubs the back of his head, chewing the inside of his cheek.] Now I know that it’s really personal so it’s okay if you don’t want to, but if people who’ve been in there could tell me about their experience and answer a few questions, it’d help me a lot. We can talk in private or something and I promise to keep it between us. I just really need to find out more about the Mist-the sooner I can figure this out, the better.
In exchange, I'm happy to help out with anything. I know a lot about machinery, so if you have anything broken, I can fix it. It's not much, but it's something.
♠ Mun
Name: Smurf
Journal: ”peacefulpanda”
Contact Info: PMing me here works
Other Characters: None.
♠ Character Info
Name: Hamato Donatello
Movie/series: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2k3
Year/Position: Senior in high school
Non/Speaking Animal/Companion(if any): None
Powers: He doesn’t have any explicit supernatural powers, but he’s a ninja, and a skilled one at that. He’s trained his whole life for the sake of his and his family’s survival, so he’s no pushover. He can and will lay out several opponents bigger and/or stronger than he is, especially if any member of his family’s in danger. Along with that, he’s stealthy and athletic. He can scale walls, jump from building to building for miles in the city, do flips in the air, and do it all completely silently. Turn your back for a moment and he can disappear, and he can stay disappeared for a while.
He is actually one of the finest minds of the world, outmatching even a Nobel Prize-winning scientist by the name of Baxter Stockman. Put a scientific problem in front of him and he will solve it.
According to the episode Space Invaders III and a few other incidents, Donatello actually has a sort of psychic connection with Splinter. Or more accurately, he’s able to connect on the astral plane with his master in times of deep peril while Splinter is meditating. If he can do that, it’s possible he can do it with his brothers… if any of them were actually capable of meditating that deeply yet. Along with that, he can meditate so deeply that he goes to an astral plane, but that’s hard for him to do.
He also has the potential to harness his chi and do crazy things like punch through rock with bare hands, run at super fast speeds, and turn into a dragon, but he doesn't actually know that yet and probably won't figure out how to do it unless given the right training from the right people, so while it's worth noting, it's probably not going to be relevant.
Canon history: Here’s a timeline and here’s a list of episodes with a brief synopsis for each. There’re no more detailed histories of just Donny.
AU history: (Preemptive tl;dr: it's canon with very slight alterations to make it mesh better with the world/be more realistic up until after the Good Genes story arc, when Donatello's recovering from a secondary mutation debacle.)
Donatello and his three brothers were hatched in a pet store in New York City. They were bought by a young boy, but while he was taking them home in a jar, a can of green ooze fell off the back of a truck at an intersection and the boy dropped them by accident. The turtles and the ooze were washed into the sewer, where a rat took pity on them and gathered the turtles up in a coffee can to take to his burrow.
The next day, both the rat and the turtles had grown twice their original sizes.
They continued to mutate, and the rat, Master Splinter, took it upon himself to take care of these little ones. Soon, the one he named Donatello started to talk, and then the others learned as well.
Knowing that the outside world wouldn’t be accepting of them, Splinter taught the turtles, his ‘sons’, how to be ninjas. Each turtle got a weapon to learn how to fight with, and Donatello chose the bo staff. The turtles grew up together in the sewer, and except for the occasional bump in the road (Donatello nearly drowned once as a child to be saved by Leonardo, the turtles had an ill-fated attempt at teaching a young human boy about fighting, et cetera), they lived safely in secrecy. Then, when the turtles were fifteen, disaster struck.
Machines called Mousers ate through the foundation of their home and the tunnels surrounding it, forcing the turtles to get separated from Splinter and needing to go to the surface. While trying to get back underground, they ended up getting involved in a heist ran by the biggest local gang, the Purple Dragons, and they thwarted the whole thing. And then they were attacked by ninjas. It didn’t make sense to them either.
They finally got back underground and found a new home with Splinter, but the whole incident brought their existence to the attention of Oroku Saki, a wealthy businessman who controlled both the Purple Dragons and the ninjas who attacked the turtles.
The creator of the Mousers, Baxter Stockman, was also under the power of Saki, but he was uninvolved with the gang activity. He, instead, was involved with using his Mousers to break into banks to steal money. He had an assistant by the name of April O’Neil who found out about this, and when he realized she knew, he sent his Mousers after her. She was chased into the sewer, where the turtles saved her life. She was officially let in on the secret of their existence, and became one of their closest human friends. (Donatello developed a crush on her, but he never acted on it and they just remained very close friends.)
They went to Baxter Stockman to avenge the loss of their home and to end his multiple bank heists. They didn’t succeed in dragging Stockman to jail or anything, but they did manage to destroy his building, leading to his part in Oroku Saki’s plans failing.
Adventures were had. Raphael met a vigilante by the name of Casey Jones-at first, he was mostly considered ‘Raph’s friend’, but Casey grew on the others, Donatello included. There were a few things that caused a bit of a fuss, like Raphael getting kidnapped by a Purple Dragon named Hun (and getting saved), the turtles needing to team up with a girl named Angel to save Casey from getting beaten to death by Purple Dragons, the homeless friends of the turtles getting kidnapped and forced into labor on a garbage island by the Garbageman (and then also being saved by the turtles), but nothing of too big consequence happened until Oroku Saki decided to approach the turtles.
Saki had a private audience with Leonardo and convinced him that they should work together, but all three of Leonardo’s brothers snuck in and eavesdropped. None were convinced, so they pushed Leonardo into consulting Master Splinter, who confessed that he knew exactly who Saki was.
It turned out Oroku Saki was actually a master ninja by the name of Shredder, leader of the Foot Clan, who had murdered Master Splinter’s old owner, Hamato Yoshi, in cold blood. Incensed that he had been tricked, Leonardo and his brothers went to tell the Shredder’s ninja that they could go to hell. This, of course, ended up with them confronting the Shredder himself. And then getting their asses kicked.
Luckily, they managed to escape before the Shredder killed them all, but they were separated. Donatello ended up with Michelangelo, who had broken his foot. After getting his little brother’s foot wrapped up and trying to hide from the Foot ninja, they were found by Splinter, who had come after them, and their brothers. They then staged a counterattack against the Shredder, where Splinter ended up kicking a water tower on his head. Figuring no one could survive that, the family finally went back home. Turned out someone could survive that.
More adventures were had, one involving investigating crystals the turtles found in their lair. They found that they were connected to an underground Foot genetics lab, where they had mutated humans into monsters. They befriended three of the monsters-Quarry, Stonebiter, and Razorfist-and in order to help them find a new power source (after having fried their last one) for their shields, they went down into an underground city where everyone was captured by a member of a long dead species that used to be dominant. The man cured the monsters of their mutations, but he wanted to make all of them-the humans and turtles-stay with him in the city. The turtles had to seal him away, but they found out that none of the humans could leave the city without turning back into monsters. Donatello promised to find a cure for them, then the turtles went back home.
Or at least they tried to.
Turned out that while they were gone, Foot ninja infiltrated the sewers in search for their lair. They and Splinter snuck out and shacked up in April’s home to wait it out. While they were there, Donatello met April’s basement tenant, Kirby, who had a crystal that temporarily brought his drawings to life. Donatello ended up going with Kirby to a dimension he had created with his crystal, and together, they saved a city under attack by monsters. Unfortunately, the portal they had used to leave was beginning to disappear, so there was only time for Donatello to get out before the portal was sealed for good. This was possibly Donatello’s first experience with real guilt and loss.
He didn’t have too much time to dwell on it, though. Soon after, the Foot ambushed Leonardo while he was on a solo training run, and they threw his beaten and broken body through the window. Turned out that the Shredder had survived, and after a massive brawl in April’s store that even Casey got involved in, the whole family (including Casey and April) only just managed to run out before the store blew up. The Shredder thought they were dead, and they went to Casey’s old country home to recuperate. It looked like Leonardo wouldn’t make it for a while there, but with the tender love and care of his family, he recovered.
After everyone recovered completely, they went to New York to kill the Shredder. It was a long and hard battle during which Stockman betrayed the Shredder and tried to kill everyone involved, but through teamwork and the help of a mysterious group of ninjas called the Guardians, the turtles were victorious and Leonardo decapitated the Shredder. (Turns out that’s survivable too.) Unfortunately, Splinter was wounded in battle and he turned up missing. Donatello fried the machines in the building, then the turtles ran.
The turtles searched through the city exhaustively for their master, but they couldn’t find him. Finally, they decided to turn their attention to the Guardians, who were the only variable during the battle that hadn’t been investigated yet. They found out that the Guardians were connected to a company called TCRI, the same company that had made the green ooze that had mutated the turtles and Splinter.
They broke in with the help of April and Casey, finding out that TCRI was actually ran by strange brain-like aliens, and they found Master Splinter in a stasis pod within. Before they could save him or get out, they accidentally stepped on a transportation pad, sending them all the way to a planet called D’Hoonnib, where they met a robot called Dr. Honeycutt, or the fugitoid, running from local army troops. They saved Honeycutt and then he saved them, and he explained where they were and what was going on. The troops that were chasing him were from the Federation, a human-like intergalactic organization bent on conquest, and they were after him for plans of a device that could make them a military superpower. This device happened to be a teleportal which, if built, could send the turtles back home.
The turtles had to find a way to get Honeycutt a quiet place to quickly make and break a teleportal, but they were interrupted when Triceratons, a dinosaur-like warrior race, came onto D’Hoonnib and kidnapped the professor. The turtles tried to save the professor and stowed away on a Triceraton ship, but it turned out that Triceratons didn’t breathe oxygen. The turtles had to resort to meditation to slow their bodies down enough to survive on what little breathable air they had and then were powerless to fight against the Triceratons when they were discovered. To be used as leverage against the resistant fugitoid, they were thrown into a Triceraton prison. Of course, they raised hell and escaped, only to be captured again and tossed into the Triceraton’s version of the gladiator games. They dominated, but Prime Leader Zanramon, the leader of the Triceratons, was furious that they won, so he sent them down with the rest of the fighter slaves, intending to pit them against each other the next day. They didn’t actually need to wait until the next day, since they ended up brawling with the slaves right down there in the quarters, but their loyalty to each other and their honor in battle won over the other slaves, especially a Triceraton slave named Traximus.
The slaves befriended the turtles and Traximus explained why he, a Triceraton, was a slave, and in the process explained a little more about the Triceratons. Apparently, he had been a player in politics that had spoken up against the Prime Leader too loudly, so he was tucked away. Triceratons were once a noble and honorable race, but with the dictatorship, their goals were less honor-oriented and more victory-oriented. This change in culture and government caused civil unrest, and there was a massive underground movement to rebel against the Triceraton government.
The next day they were pitted against each other as planned so the fugitoid would be forced to watch and be coerced into building the teleportal, but Traximus and the rest of the slaves refused, loudly defying Zanramon. The Prime Minister responded by locking away the slaves and throwing the greatest Triceraton warriors against the turtles. The turtles trounced them, jumped up to the Prime Leader’s box, and took him hostage. Because that was really the best idea they could come up with. They used him to get the guards to stand down and to get to the professor’s lab, where they convinced him to make them the teleportal so they could go home (and where Donatello accidentally revealed to Zanramon that he could just take the professor’s robot body and forcefully download the information off him).
They went to take Zanramon’s private cruiser, but Triceratons intercepted and Zanramon escaped, though the turtles still managed to steal the cruiser and fly off. Of course, fate didn’t like them actually having a stroke of luck, so the Triceratons chased them and the Federation invaded to find the fugitoid. The turtles landed on a small asteroid to try to build the teleportal, desperately stalling both sides of the war, but the Triceratons and the Federation touched down on the asteroid and started trying to get the professor/kill each other right when the teleportal was finished. The turtles and the fugitoid tried to leave, but the teleportal malfunctioned and broke. Then a big light came down from the sky and teleported the turtles, the professor, and a bunch of Triceraton and Federation troops back to the TCRI building. (Yeah, remember that place?)
Of course, the alien military troops freaked out, trying to kill each other in the middle of the building, and the brain-like aliens zapped them all back to the asteroid. All, that is, except one lone Triceraton who escaped to the sewer.
Then the brain-like aliens brought out Master Splinter, good as new, and explained that they were just saving his life. An alien named Mortu introduced himself as the aliens’ leader, and explained that they were called the Utroms. He decided to show Splinter and the turtles the history of the Utroms on Earth by putting them in pods that would link them with the memories of all the Utroms in the building. (Apparently, Utroms have a culture around being ‘one’.)
The turtles found out that the Utroms of TCRI were actually once the crew of a ship meant to capture and transport one of the Utroms’ most dangerous criminal: Ch’rell. Things were going fine until Ch’rell escaped his restraints and caused the ship to crash on a tiny island of a nearby planet: Japan, Earth. The Utroms made an exoskeleton to wander around with the humans from the scraps of their ship, one of which Ch’rell stole, and they resigned themselves to waiting for centuries for Earth’s technology to get to the point where they could make a teleportation device to go back home.
Outside of the pods, Baxter Stockman, now in a little spider robot body, broke into the TCRI building and messed with the pods’ wiring. This caused the illusion to become ‘real’ for the turtles, so they were affected by their environment.
Of course, they got to meet the Shredder’s ancestor, who also hated the Utroms and tried to destroy them all. When the illusion became real, they were nearly killed by the Shredder. The turtles tracked down the virtual Utroms for help, but when they found them, Shredder came along again. Leonardo defeated the Shredder by using his mind to control the illusion, proving to virtual Mortu that they were telling the truth about being stuck in virtual reality and activating the failsafe that brought them out.
And then the Shredder attacked the TCRI building.
A battle broke out, during which Honeycutt shorted out the program that kept Stockman obedient to the Shredder, causing Stockman to betray him and leave. The Utroms had to evacuate using their teleporter to go home, and they brought Professor Honeycutt with them, leaving the turtles and Splinter to duke it out with Shredder. During the battle, they found out that the Shredder was an Utrom. Ch’rell, to be exact.
Ch’rell set the building to explode, but the turtles and Splinter escaped in the nick of time, leading him to be destroyed with everything else. (And that happens to be survivable as well. Shredder’s bad at staying dead.)
More adventures were had! Among them being fighting off a creature made of nano bots, Leonardo getting challenged and nearly murdered by a ninja known only as the Daimyo’s son (though Leonardo defeated him and ‘shamed’ him in front of his father, so keep him in mind), and fighting a mutant crocodile named Leatherhead.
Leatherhead happened to be similar to them in that he was mutated by Utrom ooze, but he was kept by the Utroms and raised by them. He was a gentle and ingenious soul, but he retained his instinct to be a vicious animal, so he was often caught between wanting to be peaceful and his violent tendencies. Unfortunately, they didn’t have time to get him before they evacuated, so he fled to the sewers, where Stockman found him. Stockman convinced him that the turtles were the reason the Utroms left and that he had to destroy them, but in the end the turtles made him realize that they were the good guys. The tunnel they were in began to collapse and Leatherhead saved them by holding up the ceiling long enough for them to escape, though everything collapsed on top of him.
Afterwards, Donatello finally made a breakthrough with the crystals. (Remember those? The ones involved with the underground city and those mutant humans?) He had been working on the problem since he promised everyone in the underground city that he’d save them. He had a dream that told him to ‘listen’, leading him to realize that the crystals dissolved with certain sonic waves. He had found a cure for the mutation.
The turtles immediately went to the underground city, only to find that the Crystal Moon, the massive crystal in the cavern that powered everything (including the crystals that kept the humans not mutated) was gone and that everyone had turned into mindless monsters. Donatello managed to administer his cure to Quarry (now Sydney), who turned back to her human self. She explained that everyone had gotten impatient waiting for Donatello to bring a cure, so they tried to blow a piece off the Crystal Moon to work on themselves. They managed to dislodge the Moon entirely and it fell into the lava, making them revert to monsters.
Donatello drew up a plan to get the Moon, but it was tricky. It involved tunneling into the lava and hooking the Moon up to a cable with only their tunneler’s heat shields. He and Quarry nearly died, but at the last minute, they succeeded and tunneled their way out of the lava. Donatello gave everyone the cure and the turtles personally took their newly not-mutated friends to the surface, where they could finally return to the lives the Foot had stolen from them.
Unfortunately, all was not happiness and sunshine. You see, Shredder was a power player in organized crime, and his leadership was what caused the Foot to practically rule criminal New York City. With him gone, the Mafia, the Purple Dragons, and the Foot all were squabbling over his turf. It broke out into a massive turf war for which the turtles were partially to blame. Leonardo, wracked with guilt, went out to try to help in some way. Donatello and Michelangelo decided to help him because they understood where he was coming from and didn’t want him to get into a situation he couldn’t get out of, at least not alone, and then Casey got in on it because he’s both a vigilante and their friend. After joining them for a while, Raphael blew up and refused to help anymore, declaring that it wasn’t their fight.
After their first couple fights with mobsters, gang members, and Foot Elite, a woman belonging to the Foot showed up. She introduced herself as Karai, and she was the adopted daughter of the Shredder and the leader of Japan’s chapter of the Foot. She had come to put an end to the turf war and to take her father’s place. She offered to make a deal with the turtles, asking them to help her end the war by being her backup plan, and in return, the Foot would not seek revenge against them for killing the Shredder. They agreed.
…And they managed to nearly die, but last minute, Raphael and Splinter jumped in and helped turn the tide of the battle, helping Karai put down the mobsters and to knock the New York City Foot Elite down a few pegs until they swore fealty to her. Karai promised to hold up her end of the bargain, but on the sly, she was repairing Ch’rell’s body with alien creatures, and he was determined to get revenge.
And then, you guessed it, more adventures were had. Short ones, though, like finding the Garbageman (remember him?) at the bottom of the river sinking freighters and saving a sports trophy important to Casey from a bunch of roughnecks.
The turtles came across that one missing Triceraton from the group that got teleported in the TCRI building (yeah, do you remember him also? Protip: remember everyone, no matter how minor). He had been walking around the sewers, but his face mask got cracked, causing him to lose air and forcing him to breathe oxygen. Now, Triceratons live off of nitrogen and sulfur, not oxygen. He was breathing poison, poison that caused him to hallucinate and have delusions. He thought the turtles were commanding officers, but Donatello, seeing how much he was suffering, ignored Raphael’s protests and tried to patch up things a bit so the Triceraton, Zog, could have a tube leading to a proper portable air supply. It wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t dying.
They were then attacked by a Foot mech in the likeness of Master Splinter, which Zog made short work of, but they decided to counterattack. The Foot were working off a boat, and the turtles found them, splitting up with the intent of making the boat go out into the river and blow up. Of course everything went to hell and they nearly died, and Karai couldn’t make herself kill Leonardo, and Shredder went down with the ship (and survived yet again), and Zog bravely sacrificed his life so the turtles and Splinter could live.
More adventures! This time involving magic puzzle boxes that sent the turtles and April into another planet where giant hornets kept trying to kill them and managing to get mixed up with the Justice Force, a bunch of superheroes Mikey idolized. Along with this, the Mist started in on the world, but the threat of the Mist seemed rather minor at the time.
Then, like he had been doing every three years, Splinter left the lair for a few days, leaving only instructions for the boys to not get into too much trouble while he was gone. The turtles, being a curious lot, decided to follow their master and discovered he made a portal to another planet. Of course, they followed him. And ended up getting in a fight with a bunch of stick people, beating them. Then they ran into Splinter, who was very disapproving about the fact they had followed him, but a friend of his, a giant four-armed creature, was excited as all hell to be able to explain stuff to them, which he did.
This planet was called the Battle Nexus, where warriors from all across the universe came to fight each other in a tournament, and whoever won would be crowned the greatest warrior in the universe. In the last tournament, Master Splinter had won (defeating a dragon-like being called Draco-keep him in mind) like his Master Yoshi before him.
Then the Ultimate Daimyo, the head of the Battle Nexus, appeared, revealing that not only was he an old friend of Splinter, but he was also the father of the ninja who had attacked Leonardo without provocation way back when (do you also remember him? You probably don’t, since you’re trying to remember half a dozen seemingly minor villains and characters). The Daimyo forced his son to apologize to Leonardo and his family, which they accepted, and after some hesitation, Splinter allowed that his sons be entered into the Battle Nexus Tournament.
Almost immediately, Leonardo got attacked by assassins when he was away from everyone else because the Daimyo’s son had some real problems with admitting to defeat (and thus held one hell of a grudge). A humanoid rabbit called Miyamoto Usagi (another contestant in the tournament) came in and helped him out of the situation, but Leonardo didn’t have a chance to investigate. The tournament began.
Oh, also, Traximus was there. Remember Traximus? Of course you don’t. He was the only Triceraton slave in the Triceraton gladiator games, and he explained that in the confusion the turtles caused, he and the other slaves were able to escape. Now he was in the Nexus as a contestant.
Donatello was the first turtle out, a fact he lamented because he expected that his brothers would never let him live that one down. He spent his time watching the rest of the tournament, though, and saw that Master Splinter willingly bowed out of the competition when he was pitted against Michelangelo, preferring that his sons be able to have a fair chance at winning instead of trouncing them. That, however, wasn’t the most interesting battle.
Usagi and Leonardo were put against each other, a fact they had predicted but that they didn’t regret, both of them deciding that they could fight a proper honorable battle while still remaining friends. The Daimyo’s son, unknown to anyone but his councilor, had different plans, though, and shot a poison dart at Leonardo in the middle of the battle. Donatello (and everyone else) was treated to the sight of his brother collapsing with no visible wounds in the middle of a battle with a random contestant, and Donatello, understandably, flipped.
The match was nullified and Usagi insisted on being allowed to take Leonardo to the grand healer, but Donatello jumped down from the observer’s box with his weapon at the ready and demanded that Usagi get the hell away from his brother, thinking that Usagi was the one to hurt him. Donatello couldn’t stop Usagi from coming with them to the healer, but he didn’t let him touch Leonardo.
The Daimyo’s son and his councilor launched an assassination attempt against the Daimyo, nearly killing him and framing Splinter for the attempt. Around this time, both Traximus and Raphael were knocked out of the race, leaving only Michelangelo. With the Daimyo dying, the healer practically forgot about Leonardo, leaving a flailing Don to try to help his brother. (It was at this time that Donatello got a fuller perspective on his role as a doctor as well as an engineer, since he realized that there would be times when just rudimentary knowledge of science and first aid wouldn’t be enough if Splinter wasn’t around. From this point, he started taking that part of his role a lot more seriously and started learning medicine more in-depth.)
Usagi figured out what was wrong and gave Leonardo medicine to help, somewhat earning a bit of Donatello’s trust, and then the assassins came back to try to finish off the Daimyo, knocking out all the guards and the healer on the way. Usagi and Donatello had the fun of trying to single-handedly protect both Leonardo and the Daimyo against scores of assassins. Luckily, Leonardo woke up during the battle and joined in, helping drive back the assassins entirely. During all this, Raphael and Traximus saved Splinter from the Daimyo’s dungeon, Michelangelo got to the final battle, and the councilor helping the Daimyo’s son revealed himself to be Draco, that dragon that Splinter had defeated in the tournament years ago. Both Draco and the Daimyo’s son were after the Daimyo’s war staff, an extremely powerful artifact. Battle broke out involving everyone, and the battle spilled into the final battle of the tournament, where Michelangelo was. In the struggle, Draco got hold of the staff and accidentally ripped open a portal leading to a black hole. Oops.
Draco and the Daimyo’s son ended up getting pulled into the portal before the Daimyo (now well enough to walk with the help of Splinter) got his staff back and closed it up. And by accident, Michelangelo knocked out his opponent in the battle, leading to him becoming Battle Nexus Champion.
And then they went back home.
But guess what? The turtles never get any downtime.
Remember the Triceratons? Yeah, well they tracked down the teleportation residue from the Utroms to Earth, thinking that Professor Honeycutt was still there. He wasn’t, actually, but they didn’t know that. The aliens invaded New York City and demanded to speak to the world leaders, but since the Mist had shorted out communication to the outside, they only got the president. Of course, the president had no idea what the hell they were going on about with fugitoids and teleportals and terrapin creatures and such. The Triceratons attacked the city, capturing Casey and April. The turtles broke them and the rest of the humans out, but Donatello was captured when he was saving April.
Donatello was taken to the mother ship to be interrogated personally by Zanramon. He wasn’t treated well. In the face of death threats and torture, he refused to tell them anything other than that the fugitoid was no longer on Earth. When they couldn’t get where he was out of him, they forced a mind probe on it, which basically forcefully wrenched out his whole past and displayed it on a screen. That happened to be a very painful, invasive, and potentially fatal process, by the way.
Donatello focused all his mental strength and reached out spiritually to Splinter, who lent him his strength, and Donatello destroyed the probe before it could tell the Triceratons where Honeycutt went. This just got Zanramon angry, and he threatened to pulverize all of New York City, since he knew that Donatello’s brothers were in there.
That got a reaction.
It was the one threat that Donatello responded to, but his response was less ‘okay here’s where the fugitoid went’ and more ‘you have to believe me here why don’t you just scan for his presence or something’. He convinced the Triceratons to do a simple scan for the fugitoid, then his brothers were captured in the Triceraton mothership and all four of them were sent off to be tortured. Donatello was ready to scold his brothers for their carelessness in trying to save him, then it turned out the guard that had ‘captured’ them was actually an ally.
The turtles, when they had found out Donatello had been captured, immediately hijacked a Triceraton craft and infiltrated the mothership, teaming up with the rebellion that Traximus was leading. One of the rebels disguised himself as a guard and ‘captured’ them, and now they were making a break for it.
And they, of course, decided to steal Zanramon’s new personal cruiser. Again. Because fuck Zanramon.
After a certain amount of fancy flying and the Triceratons completing their scan for the fugitoid (and finding that he wasn’t on Earth), they survived and the Triceratons left Earth.
Then, almost immediately, Honeycutt came back to help Earth with the Triceratons. Because fate loves fucking with the turtles. And Donatello is never allowed to have recovery time.
This, of course, attracted the Triceratons again. Honeycutt had already erased the teleportal plans from his hard drive, so he tried to offer himself up to the Triceratons to convince them to stop fighting the Federation, but the turtles refused to let him get captured. Then they got captured, only by human military.
Bishop was the head of a secret anti-alien division of the government, and he had taken special interest in the turtles. He gave the professor to the Federation and prepared to dissect the turtles, revealing in the process that he had Leatherhead (remember him? Of course you don’t) as another test subject. Luckily, Splinter, April, and Casey jumped in last minute and saved the turtles, driving off Bishop and saving Leatherhead in the process. They all then went to get the professor.
He was already hooked up to Federation equipment, and when the Federation discovered that the professor really didn’t have the teleportal plans anymore, he tried to upload a virus to the Federation mainframe. He failed at first, but when the turtles (plus Splinter, April, Casey, and Leatherhead) broke in, he convinced Donatello to turn all the computers on to let him upload the virus properly. Unfortunately, as he and Donatello had predicted, his robot body wasn’t built to handle that kind of power and shut down after uploading the virus.
The virus spread from the Federation mainframe to Federation ships, then to Triceraton ships. Zanramon ordered his soldiers to attack the Federation while they were down and leave the stranded scouts to die, all of which went right in the face of a Triceraton’s idea of honor, and this lent them the catalyst for the rebellion to rise and knock Zanramon off his throne, placing Traximus as leader and bringing back the republic. This caused the war against the Federation to end, and both the Federation and the Triceratons left Earth.
Adventures were had! Adventures involving dealing with alien hate mongers, trying to take care of an emotionally unstable Leatherhead, encountering Karai bots (robots built like Karai), duking it out with a Cthulu monster thing, discovering that Professor Honeycutt was actually alive on Donatello’s palmtop, going back to the underground city and destroying it, and helping save Karai from Bishop. Lots of fun adventures that would take forever explaining. Among them was a very random adventure where an apprentice timestress (a girl apprenticed to Lord Simultaneous, a lord of time stationed on a far off planet) stole the time scepter (a scepter in charge of time and space with untold amounts of power) and randomly dropped on top of the turtles while they were minding their own business, having a water fight. This ended up with them in medieval Europe, trying to get said timestress and time scepter away from a demon sorcerer out for revenge against Lord Simultaneous, who had banished him to that distant time period. And that ended up with the sorcerer’s pet dragon turning out to be Ultimate Draco. Confused yet?
Ultimate Draco was the product of the Daimyo’s son and Draco being sucked into the black hole way back during the Battle Nexus tournament. They had been spending eternity in a pocket of space, fusing together into one being, until they broke themselves out and searched for the time scepter in order to get revenge on the turtles. Lord Simultaneous showed up and banished the demon sorcerer, Savanti, to the crustaceous period and sent the timestress, Renet, and the turtles back to their original time and places, but Ultimate Draco got away with the scepter.
Soon afterwards, Ultimate Draco showed up in the turtle’s lair and sent the entire family to different spots in time and space.
Donatello was sent to what could have been thirty years in the future or another planet with suspiciously similar circumstances to Earth; he was never sure. The Shredder had taken over completely, and before Donatello understood his situation, he was attacked by soldiers. Then he was saved by Michelangelo.
Michelangelo was missing an arm, which was the first thing Donatello noticed, but Michelangelo angrily blew off any questions and accused Donatello of abandoning him and the family. In this time/world, Donatello had been missing for thirty years, and everything had gone to hell.
Michelangelo explained the situation while they ran away to the park. It was thirty years in the future, the family had fallen apart without Donatello, and Shredder ruled supreme. He showed Donatello Master Splinter’s grave without warning, causing Don to break down for a bit.
After Donatello made it clear he fully intended to fight the regime, Michelangelo agreed to take him to April, who was in charge of the rebellion.
April was overjoyed to see Donatello alive, but the joy was dampened when he asked where Casey was. He was dead. Then he saw Hun and Stockman-both thirty years older, fused together as a punishment from the Shredder, and both working for the rebellion. He asked April to gather Raphael and Leonardo, which she agreed to.
Raphael was missing an eye and Leonardo was blind. As soon as they met each other when going to meet April, they were ready to duel to the death. Right before they attacked each other, Donatello came in, knocking them both down and trying to talk sense to them. He managed to pull together the frayed and broken pieces of his family and got them to agree to giving defeating the Shredder one last shot.
He spent days, maybe even a couple weeks, working on modifying a captured Karai bot to serve their purposes. He lost track of time and wouldn’t be able to tell anyone exactly how long he was there. Finally, the family attacked Shredder in his stronghold.
Hun, connected to Stockman, immediately tried to go back to the Shredder and begged to be allowed to serve him again, but the Shredder responded only by crushing them both underfoot. Then Michelangelo was overwhelmed by Karai bots and killed. Then Leonardo, momentarily distracted by a Karai bot, was stabbed in the back by the real Karai, killing him almost immediately. Raphael, completely and utterly enraged and grief-stricken, attacked Karai, but she easily bested him too. Raphael died crying out for Leonardo and his dead body fell so his arm was draped on his brother. Then April killed Karai. All this happened right in front of Donatello.
Donatello, well and truly furious, managed to obliterate the Shredder. That only left him, April, and the bodies of his family and enemies alike. Black Mist began to creep in, but Donatello wasn’t in a state to notice.
He was in shock and deeply traumatized, but before he had a chance to grieve for his fallen brothers, he was phased away from that place, staying only long enough to hear April tell him that there’s always hope, no matter what.
Then he, regular!Raphael, and regular!Michelangelo were all teleported from their respective places in time and space to see Splinter grappling with Ultimate Draco for the time scepter. Donatello immediately glomped his brothers, jabbering about them being young and alive and Mike having both arms, and he managed to confuse them deeply. Then everyone was distracted by the fact that they needed to get Master Splinter and stop Ultimate Draco. (See Personality section for more detail on Donatello’s reaction to the whole mess.)
Then, luckily, the time scepter decided to set things right and dumped everyone into the Battle Nexus before tearing apart Draco and the Daimyo’s son, then turning them to dust. Lord Simultaneous showed up and explained the whole situation to everyone, but when he saw the Daimyo, who was in deep grieving for his son, he revived the Daimyo’s son as a small child to demonstrate the good powers of the scepter. Then he sent everyone back home.
And before Donatello got a chance to process his trauma and maybe confide in Splinter fully what happened, Splinter was kidnapped by Bishop, who wanted his DNA. The turtles plus Honeycutt and Leatherhead went and saved Splinter, but not before finding out Bishop’s plans to raise an army of clones to purge aliens from the world.
And then the Shredder decided to leave Earth to destroy the Utroms. The turtles couldn’t let that happen, so they, Splinter, and Honeycutt (with help from all their friends) fought their way onboard the rocket just before it launched. They all fought long and hard, but the Shredder, with Karai’s help, defeated them. He was about to kill them before a malfunction separated them for a few minutes, when the dying family all agreed that, if they were to die, they’d take Shredder with them. Donatello was the one who told Honeycutt to overload the rocket’s power core so the ship would explode, and he was the one to plug the professor in. Moments before they all actually died, though, the Utroms jumped in and put time into stasis temporarily, just so they had the time to grab everyone from off the ship.
Ch’rell was tried by an Utrom court, and was found guilty of numerous war crimes. He was banished to an ice asteroid and the family was sent back home. April and Casey brought them to Casey’s country home to rest, but there was very little rest to be had, between things like Casey’s cousin coming in with gang members, saving merpeople from radioactive power plants, and helping alien women wrest control from dictators (the alien woman challenging her leader to a fight for rule was, by the way, the object of one of Donatello’s crushes). Their physical wounds healed, but not all emotional ones, especially not Leonardo’s. Leonardo started down a spiral of anger and moodiness.
Then they all went back to New York, where Leonardo became increasingly moody and pushes his brothers harder in training. They fought monsters-monsters both tragic and horrible, along with Hun, the Purple Dragons, and a small-scale staged alien invasion by Bishop-and Leonardo began to fall apart. Even a visit from Usagi couldn’t soothe him, and Donatello sat back and worried about his brother until Leonardo snapped during training, ending up wounding Master Splinter.
Splinter sent Leonardo away to the Land of Dragons, where he stayed for two months. In that time, Donatello (and everyone else, really) never got used to the idea that one of the turtles was missing. Things didn’t feel complete without Leonardo.
And then, of course, the lair was attacked by Karai out for revenge for the Shredder. Everyone was separated and Splinter was wounded, so Donatello took his father to their submarine and tried to dive their way to safety. They managed to escape right before the Foot blew up the sub, but Donatello had to swim with Splinter to safety and carry him away to tend to his wounds. He and Splinter were holed up like animals, Donatello being the only one capable of defending them, and they had no idea where Raphael and Michelangelo were, or if they were even alive.
Luckily, Leonardo, having come back to New York, found them and gathered up the entire family from across the city. They found a new place to stay, and after Leonardo went to Karai to tell her to back the hell off or else, they tried to put their lives back together.
Then there was a mutant outbreak caused by Bishop’s staged invasion.
The turtles decided to try to fight the mutants and find a way to contain and cure them, though Donatello got a nasty gash from one of them. As they fought and had adventures (involving more time/space travel and dealing with Stockman’s new rotting body), Donatello became progressively more sick, until he finally became too ill to fight. Casey and April were looking after him when the illness reached crescendo, giving him a secondary mutation. He had been infected by the outbreak.
The turtles and Leatherhead managed to capture him, but he was a thoughtless beast and Leatherhead said that he just couldn’t find a cure in time for him. At a loss without Donatello, the family decided to broker a deal with Bishop for a cure. They had to make sacrifices and steal a pendent from Karai in exchange, but they did so gladly for their brother. Through Stockman and Leatherhead’s work, a cure was found, Donatello was fixed, and all the mutants were changed back to normal.
Unfortunately, this was when the Mist really started rolling in. The mutation had taken a lot out of Donatello and he needed recovery time, which he wouldn’t be able to get with Strangelings and Mist around, and his family was very worried that the Strangelings would prey on Donatello’s weak state and trigger a relapse (what they should have worried about was the Mist possibly forcing Donatello to face all the trauma that had built up since the Ultimate Draco incident at once and it being too much for him). Donatello insisted that he had to be out there to help his brothers and working on a way to beat back the Mist in his lab, while his family kept trying to keep him resting, since all the agitation wasn’t doing anything for his physical or mental recovery.
Then he received an invite from the Disney Academy, which was strange because they didn’t even know Disney Academy knew they existed.
On one hand, the concept of going to an actual school would usually make Donatello overjoyed, but on the other, he was too concerned about his family to think about considering the opportunity in front of him. His brothers, however, all encouraged him to go, since Disney Academy was safer than New York City and he’d be able to recover before returning to them. After some hesitation (Splinter never liked having any of his sons far away), Splinter agreed and told him he should go. With his whole family behind him, Donatello decided to go, but for different reasons than one would think; yes, the idea of education was wonderfully appealing, but he also didn’t want his family to have to worry about him while they were busy taking care of New York; as well as that, he thought that he would have better materials and tools to work with at the Academy in order to figure out the Mist. He fully intends to throw himself into finding a way to get rid of it.
Personality: The first thing you know about Donatello is that he’s the geeky brother, emphasis on brother. He’s spent his whole life being almost exclusively with his family, and his personality has developed according to how he relates to them. He is the gadget guy, the smart one, the healer, and the gentle turtle. There’s more to him than just his role in the family, but sometimes that’s difficult to remember.
Make no mistake, he enjoys his role. Growing up, he loved fiddling with electronics, and as he grew, he was able to build things. He’s easily one of the finest minds of his entire generation, besting even the renowned scientist, Baxter Stockman, on several occasions. Even so, he doesn’t let it inflate his ego to ungodly proportions and always remembers his responsibility to his family, and that responsibility is to keep things running smoothly on the home front. He needs to make and repair the technology they need to survive, from basic things like heating to complex networks of alarms and defenses that keep their home safe. Not only that, but if his brothers are sick or hurt and Splinter isn’t there to help, he’s the one who takes care of them. Even more so, as the series goes on, he becomes the first person to turn to when someone’s hurt. Next to Leonardo’s role as leader, it’s one of the biggest responsibilities in the family with the most consequences if he screws up, and he knows that. He’s responsible enough to be trusted with the role.
He loves his family more than anything and would lay down his life for any of his brothers without hesitation. He’s fiercely loyal to them, and not only that, he’s fiercely loyal to anyone he considers a friend. Friends are few and far in between for his family, so when he finds someone who doesn’t immediately run away and/or try to kill him, they’re treasured. Once he’s well and truly made friends with someone, if you mess with them, you mess with him.
That’s not to say he’s violent. On the contrary, he’s easily the most gentle and passive turtle, and he’d rather talk through a problem calmly and politely than to fight, but because of his lifestyle, he rarely gets a chance to talk before fighting. It’s a fact he regrets since he’d really rather be a martial pacifist, but he understands the necessity of violence for survival, and he’s willing to turn to it for the safety of his loved ones.
Basically, Donatello in a nutshell: ungodly smart, kind, gentle, and loyal.
Of course, no Donatello personality section would be complete without mentioning the incident with Ultimate Draco (Same as it Never Was) and the effect on him. The incident illustrated to the audience and, more importantly, to him exactly how important he is to his family. Without him around, everything falls apart, and not just machines like he probably previously thought. With all the extreme personalities in his family, he’s the quiet but essential buffer that makes it possible for them to live with each other. The development he got from realizing that is subtle and can be up to interpretation. The following is my interpretation.
He never really had a chance to sort through his feelings about the incident. Almost immediately after he was pulled out of that world, he had to battle Ultimate Draco, and then when they got home, Splinter was kidnapped by Bishop, and then the family went up against the Shredder and nearly sacrificed their lives to destroy him. Instead of legitimately coping, he buried the memories and did his best to keep from thinking about them. Growing up in the family he did, he doesn’t feel completely comfortable opening up about any trauma he may sustain throughout their adventures-his family tends to be very rough and tumble, and the instinct is to suck up emotional wounds and keep on chugging.
He and his brothers don’t usually articulate their feelings to each other, content to show instead of tell. This system usually works just fine for them-who needs to be told that you love them when you scour the city and risk life and limb to save them when they disappear for a bit?-but it breaks down when something like the Ultimate Draco incident happens. Donatello couldn’t bring himself to reach out for the support he needed, so his brothers never gave it to him. This makes him more introverted and it’s made the issue even harder to talk about. It’s also made him take his role in the family much more seriously, seeing as he’s witnessed first-hand the consequences of his absence or failure. He appreciates his family more, but I imagine that the whole experience makes him feel isolated whenever he thinks about it since he’s used to dealing with things together with his brothers, and this is one thing he thinks he should deal with alone. It was an extremely traumatic experience, plain and simple, and he’s never gotten the chance to properly work through it.
Something else worth mentioning is the fact that he acts as a quiet source of strength and hope for his brothers. He’s the smart one, the brother with all the answers, and he has a general philosophy of succeeding in the impossible. Even if he thinks he’ll fail something, he’ll try it anyway and put his all into managing it. That helps his brothers more than he knows, or knew, seeing as he saw what his absence did during SAINW. He’s quiet and gentle, but he’s determined and will never quit, especially when a loved one hangs in the balance.
Greatest Fear: Failing. Seems pretty run of the mill, right? Well, it’s more than just an idea that he should be flawless or his ego at work-it’s knowledge of the consequences.
Donatello, next to Leonardo, has the most important job in the family. At times, it’s more important. He’s the doctor and technician, the only one who can keep the home secure and help his aging father heal his brothers. If he screws anything up with either of those jobs, his entire family could pay the consequences. Failing his family and having someone mutilated or dead because of it is a nightmarish concept for him.
After the incident with Ultimate Draco, his fear became a lot more concrete. Not only does he need to be there as a healer and an engineer, but he needs to be there to keep the family together. It just doesn’t work without him. He’s terrified of his family breaking somehow and somehow being at fault for it.
Along those lines, he's terrified of the concept that he left his brothers in that world. Something happened that made him abandon them, and he doesn't know what it was, or if it'll happen in his timeline. What Donatello's good at is thinking, and he can't just let a mystery lie. He's contemplated how and why he wouldn't return to his brothers, and if it was because he was dead, how and why his brothers wouldn't be able to find his body. Did something happen to sever his ties to his family? Is he less loyal than he thought? Is he doomed to die a mysterious death and leave his brothers to fall apart? Is he going to just leave them one day? The questions haunt him, and while he's gotten a lid on it for now, the Mist would blow the doubts wide open again.
Not only that, but he’s afraid of being alone. Not necessarily in a physical sense-he’s a solitary person and can tinker away alone in his lab happily-but spiritually. He’s afraid of losing his family somehow and being left alone as the only one of his kind. He and his brothers are so close that the idea of being left behind is unbearable. Moreover, just the idea of even one of them dying is devastating-there’s the sense that, if any of them are going to die, they’ll all go down together. No one should be ahead or behind the others.
Has your character been at the Academy before/ does your character remembering being at the Academy before?: Nope to both.
What are you plans with this character?: I feel like Donatello got the short end of the stick (pun not intended) in the show. He was developed, but any change in him was really subtle and he was often pushed to the side to be used as a tool for the plot instead of a character. I want to take the opportunity the show missed and use the nearly non-stop trauma he’s been dealing with for the past year and a half or so to explore and change him. I want him to grow up and develop an identity outside of his family.
♠ Writing
Third person writing sample:
There was little that Don disliked more than being cooped up inside while the Black Mist rolled onto campus.
He couldn’t be particularly useful if he ran from the very thing he was trying to unlock the mysteries of, could he? But he still worried. Not about himself, but about everyone else.
So he meticulously checked every floor of his dorm. One would think that it would be hard to check on every single person without actually being seen, but he was a ninja. He was used to this. He made a mental checklist of every room, and finally seeing that everyone else was safely inside, he was finally ready to go back to his own room. Too bad he wouldn’t be staying there long.
He pushed the door closed behind him, scanning his room for a second. The place wasn’t the neatest, but he knew where everything was. He pulled his duffel bag from the ground and rested it on his bed, putting in various instruments barrowed from the lab meant to help him examine the Mist, to maybe even get a sample of it (or if he was (un)lucky, a Strangeling). Finally, he picked up a small light from his desk, turning it on experimentally. It was extremely bright, but there was something soothing about it. It was what humans had dubbed a ‘happy light’, and he hoped it’d be able to take the edge off the Mist’s effects long enough for him to do his work.
Donatello turned the light in his hands, frowning. He had a theory that Strangelings fed off of negative feeling. Maybe that was what the Mist in general did. If he was correct, stemming the flow of his negative emotions should leave the Strangelings without anything to take from him, and thus make them lose interest. It was dangerous to stake so much on just a theory, but he had to find out about the Mist. He had to save his family.
He turned it off again before placing it in the back, zipping it up, though he didn’t immediately leave. Instead, he sat on his desk, examining a few pieces of paper that, at first glance, seemed to just be more pages of scribbled notes. But this was something different.
It was a letter to his family. There was at least a page for each of his brothers and his master, plus a general message for all of them. As exciting as this place was, it ached a bit to be so far away. Sending letters to them and reading the ones he received in return always took the edge off his homesickness.
So he took the time to finish off his letter. It took roughly fifteen minutes-every time he was almost done, there was something else to say-but it soothed him. His family was out there, and no matter how far away they were, he would always have their support.
After he was done, he capped his pen, leaving the letter on the desk and grabbing his duffel bag, checking to make sure his bo was on his back where it belonged. The feeling of love combined with the happy light would carry him through whatever he saw in the Mist. Even if he couldn’t see them, his family was there
He opened up his window, perching himself on the sill, and jumped down to the ground.
First person writing sample:
[Donatello turns on his communicator at his desk, various beakers and vials and tools laid out in front of him. He’s in the middle of tinkering with something or other-it was probably Mist related.]
I’m starting to hit a bit of a wall with working on the Mist. There’re a lot of variables to test out, and I don’t have enough facts. I was hoping people with more experience could help me out.
[He rubs the back of his head, chewing the inside of his cheek.] Now I know that it’s really personal so it’s okay if you don’t want to, but if people who’ve been in there could tell me about their experience and answer a few questions, it’d help me a lot. We can talk in private or something and I promise to keep it between us. I just really need to find out more about the Mist-the sooner I can figure this out, the better.
In exchange, I'm happy to help out with anything. I know a lot about machinery, so if you have anything broken, I can fix it. It's not much, but it's something.