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Donnie may claim that he figured it out first, but he didn’t figure it out so much as take shameless advantage of it without ever questioning it, so Leo’s going to maintain his bragging rights on this one.
Granted, he figured it out in one of the more embarrassing ways possible, but he did in fact figure it out first. What more do you need, really?
Okay, it would probably have been cooler if he managed to figure it out without getting kidnapped by a bunch of chumps, but hey. Can’t win ‘em all.
The chumps are unfortunately smart enough to take away his sword, so the sharpest thing Leo’s left with is his glare. He points it up towards the fisheye camera at the top of the room. It blinks a scaly eyelid at him. Mystic bullshit.
“Helloooooo,” he yells, for the fifth time. This one finally gets an answer.
“Hi, sorry for the delay. Everything is now assembled. If you cooperate, I promise your time with us will be brief.” There’s a little speaker shaped like a trumpet flower under the eyeball, because of course there is.
“Well that’s not ominous at all,” Leo says, flatly. “You’re gonna kill me, aren’t you.”
“No!” The voice sounds legitimately shocked and upset. “We didn’t get IRB approval for that. We’re just going to have you do some tests for us. Puzzles, exercises, that sort of thing. No bodily harm involved.” A significant pause. “Probably. No bodily harm anticipated, at least.”
Leo still has no idea what’s going on here, but if they’re not going to hurt him then there’s absolutely nothing to stop him from screwing with these assholes. He can do ‘recalcitrant and obnoxious’ with the best of them, as any member of his family could tell you. At length. He’s not going to cooperate at all.
He leans against the wall and smirks up at the camera with his third-smarmiest smirk. “Aw, do I get a cookie if I help you with your widdle tests?”
“No.” The door on the other side of the room opens. “You get a tomato if you do this maze.”
“Ooh, tomato maze,” Leo says, and walks through the door immediately.
The maze isn’t that hard. He’s through it in three minutes, and at the end of it, as promised, is another room with a plinth holding a perfect, red, beefsteak tomato. Leo is picking it up, gleefully prepared to take his first bite sweetened with the taste of victory, when his brain catches up with his actions.
“Wait, why did I just do that?” he asks the empty room, squinting down at the tomato.
The room does not answer. He takes a bite of the tomato anyway, because he earned it, but when he chews it’s with the pungent taste of suspicion on his tongue.
“Excellent work!” another speaker announces, and Leo experiences a warm glow of pride. He does do excellent work, thank you for noticing, mysterious voice of the person who kidnapped him. “Now, if you’ll just come this way for the next stage…”
Leo goes that way for the next stage, still eating his tomato.
When the rest of the Mad Dogz come to break him out, Leo is balancing on a two-inch beam while throwing eggs at targets painted on a wall. He’s earned four tomatoes, three cucumbers, a radish, and five carrots for accomplishing various tasks. If he finishes this one the voice says he can have a bowl of raspberries.
Not only is April extremely unimpressed by his explanation, and not only does she chew him out because they were all worried he was hurt, Mikey steals and eats the entire bowl of raspberries before Leo gets a single one. And Leo had earned those raspberries fair and square. He had GREAT aim with his eggs!
“Leo, I will buy you raspberries later if you stop complaining and help us threaten whoever grabbed you so they never do it again now,” April informs him.
“Deal,” Leo says, and stands aside so Raph can kick in the door they found on the upper level of this weird testing facility.
A yokai in the corner with giraffe spots and little horns shrieks, holding a notepad up in front of her face and then hiding it behind her back. “Wait!”
“No waiting. Raph wants answers,” Raph says. “Why did you kidnap my brother?”
“And what did you do to make him jump through all those hoops?” April demands, brandishing her flaming bat. She hadn’t liked the hoops at all, even though Leo had done some pretty sick stunts to get through the smaller ones that he was happy to brag about. “Some kind of evil mind control magic?”
“What? No. That would bias the results,” says the yokai. She does not deny access to evil mind control magic, Leo notes. “I was just using him for data. Baron Draxum hasn’t updated his publications in years and my masterwork study needs a more rigorous source base.“
“Barry is a wanted fugitive,” Mikey points out.
The yokai blinks at them. “That’s no reason not to share his findings with the alchemist’s guild."
“I can’t believe you were just using me for data,” Leo complains. Of course this is Draxum’s fault.
“You were being compensated!” she protests. “I gave you fruit! I figured if you wanted to leave, you’d leave, but you just kept doing things!”
There’s a joke Leo could make about himself and fruits in here, probably, but he’s busy collecting his odachi from where it’s propped up in the corner and running his own data back over in his head.
“So, quick poll,” he says, when Raph’s extracted a promise from the yokai not to kidnap any more unsuspecting turtles and they’re on their way back topside. “And actually think about this one. If, upon finding yourself in a strange maze, you were offered a reward for finishing it—no risk of death—” he adds quickly, before anyone can bring up the minotaur maze, “—and you wouldn’t immediately try to finish it, say aye.”
“Aye,” April says, exasperatedly, and then stops walking to squint when no one else joins her. “Guys. Guys. Seriously. You can’t all be this easily bribed.”
“I wouldn’t describe myself as easily bribed,” Donnie says. “The rest of you, absolutely, but—”
“Donnie, you reconfigured my entire computer because I told you I’d buy you a hotdog,” April says. “Oh my god. Why are you like this.”
“Three guesses and the first two don’t count,” Leo says. “Mikhael, you got your phone on you?”
Draxum doesn’t even deny it, the sheephead. “I wasn’t going to produce experimental supersoldiers and not build in a shortcut to make it simpler to gather data on the results,” he says over the video chat. Donnie nods like this is perfectly reasonable and not an insane thing to say. “Really, making you all receptive to positive attention and tangible rewards was the most humane option I could have chosen. Of course they had to imprint on you instead,” he mutters to their father, who he’s hanging out with for some reason. Like they’re getting along now or something. Ugh.
“They would do anything for watermelon as children,” Splinter reminisces.
“Well, that’s unsettling,” Raph says. “I think.”
“Most kids will do anything for watermelon,” Leo argues, and ignores April’s doubtful look. “Well, thanks for today’s semi-horrifying revelation about your plans for world conquest vis-a-vis yours truly, Draxum, it’s been a pleasure. Let’s never speak of this again.”
“Wait!” Mikey says. “Do you need to update something with the guild?”
“Hm. I should probably pay my dues, at least. They tend to get aggressive about collecting past research if you’re delinquent on payments.”
There’s a long pause before Donnie says “Aren’t we your past research?”
“Ah,” Draxum says, in the tone of a sheepman putting two and two together. Leo makes eye contact with Raph and they start walking a little faster. All in all, another fun visit to the Hidden City.
When Mikey gets off the call, April says, speculatively, “So if I gave you guys tomatoes, would you detail my mom’s car for me?”
“How many tomatoes are we talking here?” Raph asks.
Leo, having been reminded of his bounty from earlier, reaches into his shell and pulls out the radish he’s been saving to take a nice, loud, crunchy bite. Tastes like satisfaction. Tastes like being right.
“For the record, I totally knew it all along,” Donnie says.
“Buhdih,” Leo says through a mouthful of radish.