Tales of the TMNT #38

The book begins with a younger Donatello relaxing on a couch watching Shadow (I think, it could be April) play chess. He begins to tell us a story. It leaps back to the present with Donny talking about how everything holds a story, the then picks up a small training boken from when he was just a little turtle, and his story begins.

The turtles are seen in training with Master Splinter, practicing the crane style. Raphael leans forward and hits Leonardo in the back of the knee causing him to fall over and the training to be concluded. Splinter comments that he saw Raphael do that, then the turtles start beginning Splinter to let them go out into the sewers to play pirates with Donny's remote control boat, the HMS Terrapin Terror. Splinter says yes, but they have to stay inside the safe zone that he has set up. They agree to his terms and run into the sewer with their boat. While walking they wished they had eye-patches to make playing more fun. They get to the end of the safe zone and begin playing with the boat. Raphael throws a rock the water near it to act like a cannon was firing at them. The resulting wake from the rock knocked the boat out of radio range and Raphael suggests that they go and get it. Reluctantly the others agree and follow Raph past the boundary of the safe zone to get their boat back.

We are taken farther down the forbidden tunnels where we see a group of strange aliens holding an video device with a picture of the TCRI building.

Next we are taken to the TCRI building where we see a gigantic alligator who is known as Leatherhead talking to a Doctor X. He wishes to go out into the sewer waters to swim. He jokes that you can take the alligator out of the sewer, but you can't take the sewer out of the alligator he then dives into a hole and goes for a nice swim.

When they finally catch up to the boat, Raph decides that he wants to explore the others protest loudly saying that they didn't want to get in any more trouble. No sooner said Raphael spots what he says is a crocodile floating in the water Donny corrects him saying it is an alligator, Raph retorts calling him a big brain. Then Raph being the smart one he is begins throwing rocks at the alligator, first he hits his tail, then his back, his third shot hit Leatherhead square on the head. Leatherhead explodes out of the water in a blind rage. He knows they are out there but he can't see them. The turtles make a run for it, sticking to the shadows. Luckily for them, they stumbled into the strange aliens that were wandering around the sewers, they turtles get past them just as Leatherhead reaches them. Assuming that the aliens were the ones that disrupted his quiet swim he goes all out on them. As soon as he finished the last one he regained his human conscience and tells Doctor X that he shouldn't have left the confines of the TCRI building. Doctor X tells him that the creatures he killed were Sigmurethistes, enemies of the Ultrons and that they were no doubt trying to text the Ultrons defenses, when they ran into TCRI's best defense...him.

The turtles got away and had just got a chance to catch there breath when they ran into Splinter. He scolds and grounds them for defying his trust and going beyond the the safe zone he set up. Raphael tried to come up with an excuse but ultimately got grounded twice as long because he lied and lied badly at that.

We leave Donatello's story and we see him put up the training boken, and walk outside to stand on a strange building, and looking into the sunset.