Chapter Text
“Hey, Do…” Raph trails off when he rounds the corner. “Uh, sorry to interrupt.”
Donnie continues glaring at the wall, refusing to back down. “No need. You’ve interrupted nothing. The Lair and I have concluded negotiations, haven’t we?” The pipes rattle, then subside. Donnie allows himself a small fist bump, then turns to Raph, who’s rubbing the back of his neck. Donnie sighs. “What’s broken this time?”
Leading Donnie down the halls, Raph explains, “Mikey says the oven ain’t heating right, and the internet says the issue could be like a thousand things. I’m sure we can figure it out if you just point us in the right direction.” As they get closer to the kitchen, a discordant note creeps into the ambient arcano-tech hum of the Lair, a sure sign that his brothers are, as ever, mucking up one of his inventions.
“Doubtful. The average Internet handyman wouldn’t know the first thing about maintaining a Genius Built device.” Being one of his earliest inventions, their stovetop oven is a junkyard chimera forged from three different ovens, four electric hot pots, two portable grills, and a leafblower. Each offer to replace it has been rejected on the grounds that it’s the stovetop that Mikey learned to cook on, which somehow makes it an irreplaceable member of the family. It’s all Donnie can do to sneak in upgrades during its many, many breakdowns.
They turn the corner, and the oven’s whine is joined by a pungent cacophony of burnt eggs, lavender, and raw onion, all competing for worst in show. Gagging, Donnie reaches through the wiring and turns the kitchen’s overhead fans on, full-blast. Gods, what was Mikey cooking? A chemical weapon? Surely not without him.
Before he can turn around to grab protective equipment, Raph hands him a tiny jar of minty ointment. “From Leo.” He stares into the middle distance. “Not sure if it works. The stench killed my sniffer before he brought it in, but maybe yours can still be saved.”
Donnie flips his magitech goggles down to examine it. While there’s no doubt that smearing this under his nostrils will help, likely to a degree comparable to his gas mask, he runs the risk of waking up tomorrow with a purple handlebar mustache, or whatever mischievous side effect Leo’s put in this time. A few seconds pass without any unusual readings, approximately one second longer than Donnie can remember to hold his breath, and well, the consequences can’t be worse than the unholy stench.
It was the right choice. Neither distance nor ventilation would have saved him from the orange-tinged smoke suffusing the kitchen. Most of it pours from ramekins in varying states of under- and over-baked distress, but dear Angelo’s upset is so pervasive that even the bowls of unused ingredients and batter are leaking miasma. He supposes he should be grateful that nothing’s on fire this time.
Soupy meringue drips off the paddle of the stand mixer and onto the floor, slowly melting towards the open oven. Beside it sits his younger brother, leveling a stormy pout at his laptop. “I told you not to get him!” Mikey whines, barely audible beneath the overhead fans and the oven’s unhappy D7. He slams his laptop shut and tosses it onto the oven door, making space to lean forward and gaze up at them with wide, entreating eyes. “But since you’re here anyways… does that mean your big project is going well?”
His ruse is more transparent than glass, perhaps even exceeding the visible transmission percentage of aerogel. If Donnie answers no, Mikey will boo commiseratingly and suggest the oven as an easy fix to clear his mind. If Donnie answers yes, Mikey will cheer and offer to cook a celebratory dinner, smoothing the road to his request with plenty of flattery and bribery. Either way, Donnie will end up fixing the oven. He might as well choose the option that gets him compliments and a fancy meal.
Bolstered by his successful negotiation with the lair, Donnie extracts his price with much less haggling than usual. Mikey sweeps him into a tight, unavoidable hug, but Raph takes in his generosity with a completely unfair squint.
Before Raph can act on his suspicions, Donnie says, “The timing of this catastrophe is actually quite serendipitous.” His brothers stare blankly. “Why, you ask? Aren’t you tired of your broken appliances getting shoved to the bottom of my priority list? Don’t the endless minutiae of Lair upkeep bog you down? Wouldn’t you rather spend your time working on more valuable projects? Well, then I have a—”
“Please don’t say, ‘fix, bro,’” Leo groans from the side, having sneaked in with a toolkit at some point during Donnie’s pitch.
With a frosty glare, Donnie pointedly finishes, “A fix, bro.” He regains his composure and pulls up the program, praying that the Lair will keep its metaphorical word (it keeps shooting down his offers to hook it up with a vocal synthesizer). “Presenting…”
With a few taps to his magitech gauntlet, the trapdoors in the wall slide open, the Lair’s arcano-tech hum crescendos, and then, finally, after weeks of research and labor, the power goes out. That can’t be right. The power goes out?
“Little doors, my favorite! Are there prizes behind them?” Mikey futilely pries at a half-open door, squishing his face against the floor to peer inside. Snickering, Leo sets the toolkit down in favor of photographing their little brother’s efforts with his crystal.
Donnie taps his gauntlet screen again and again, and when that doesn’t work, bangs on the nearest wall. “We had a deal,” he hisses. Not even a creak in response. “You’re embarrassing me.” Worse, the appliances in his Genius Built intranet are blinking out one-on-one, confining his senses to the middling organs of his body. Pants Pants Revolution could be exploding as they speak.
Calm down. This wasn’t part of the plan, but he can still salvage this. This is fine. This is fine!
“Hey, now that we know Donnie’s thing doesn’t work, can we go out for lunch?” Leo says. The power flickers back on, then steadies, the intranet sounding off like an orchestra tuning to an oboe’s clarion A. “All that problem solving deserves a treat, right, Raph?”
Donnie’s hand creeps towards his magitech gauntlet, ready to try again, and Raph arrests his shoulder with the strength of an offended crab, looming every inch he has on Donnie. When Mikey lunges for a mixing bowl, he grabs him too, slinging him over his shoulder despite his protests. “Cool it with the experiments, you two. Time to eat.”
Raph marches the three of them to the front door and turns the dial to Bastion City, yellow light flashing through the cracks in the wood. When they step through, instead of the hard-packed dirt outside their cottage, they stand in a musty alleyway, just a stone’s throw from their favorite restaurant.
Run of the Mill is alive with conversation and the scrape of utensils against sturdy ceramic. Waiters of various shapes and sizes plod, slide, and float through the restaurant as customers hork down delicious and strange-looking platters. One dragonborn slams her claws on a table and screams down her tablemates, sparks flying alongside her spittle. Before anything can light, a many-tentacled busboy sprays fire-extinguishing foam over her entire head, carefully avoiding her entree.
Sat in their usual booth by the door, Donnie and his brothers exchange mindless chit-chat over free bread, which Donnie ignores in favor of scrolling through an artificer forum on his crystal. No matter how hard he looks, he can’t figure out where his invention failed. None of the other artificers seem to have suffered the same issue with their infusions, and Donnie even sees a ‘That was way easier than I thought,’ from a user who once dismantled their entire prototype before checking if it was plugged in.
His fuming is interrupted by a dark-skinned hand plucking his crystal right out of his hands. “No troubleshooting at mealtimes,” April stresses, not for the first time. She waits until he grumbles an assent to hand it back, rolling her eyes fondly as she slides into the booth beside Leo. Coming from his brothers, he wouldn’t stand for the restriction, but April once sent him a fascinating study on the drawbacks of extended crystal-time, and also her folder of unflattering blackmail pictures rivals his own.
The five of them settle in with their usual order (six extra-large specialty pizzas plus a small cheese for April) and discuss what to do now that their planned Maritho Karpet tournament is off the table, the Lair being closed for fumigation. It’s a familiar song and dance, grasping at straws to fill the endless, idle hours, but lucky for his siblings, Donnie has just the thing to shake things up.
Three days ago, for reasons unknown, a dungeon transplanted itself into the cursed soil of the woods outside Bastion City, bulging from the treeline like an enormous teal pimple. The unadventurous city folk waited with baited breath for a band of goblins or horde of shambling undead to emerge from the shadows, the natural progression to any dungeon eruption, but all that came out of the Lost Woods were more missing person reports.
Unlike the talking heads dithering over next steps in town halls and public broadcasts, Donnie knew what he would do with the dungeon the moment he learned of it. He and his three brothers grew up devouring every adventure story they could get their hands on, and somewhere between Jupiter Jim’s Wildspace explorations and Lou Jitsu’s stylish victories, they developed an appetite for the real thing. It wasn’t a question of if they would pay the dungeon a visit, but a matter of how soon.
Donnie clears his throat and beneath his brothers’ raucous enthusiasm, says to April, “You’re coming, aren’t you?”
Her smile tips into a grimace. “Aw, Donnie, I appreciate the invite, but—”
“You’re not coming?” Leo gasps, disentangling himself from Raph and Mikey’s waxing poetic. Donnie shoots him a glare, for once hoping Leo’s right about twin telepathy so he can hear Donnie’s threats against his life. “I call dibs on your supplies. Wait, can I borrow your bat? I’ve been swinging it around ever since you left it the Lair, and I think I’ve really got the hang of it.”
“My bat should be in the dojo, same as always,” April says slowly, and Donnie busies himself with a slice of pizza as she stares at him, hoping she can’t see the flush crawling up his neck. “And what do you mean, my supplies?”
“The color-coded backpack that’s monogrammed—?”
Just before Donnie strangles his twin, April’s crystal rings. She hushes Raph and Mikey with a gesture, which means all four of them get to watch the life flee her eyes in real time as she uh-huhs and I-sees her way through the conversation. After they hang up, she slumps and takes a long, miserable sip of soda.
“Aw, did you just get rejected?” Mikey asks guilelessly. Nodding, April pushes her half-eaten slice of pizza towards Raph, who gleefully shoves it into his mouth. “Their loss. You’ll find something better soon.”
“This was the last place in the city that was hiring. Ugh, I do not want to go back to running odd jobs.”
“Just so you know,” Donnie says, “I’ve calculated a 73% chance that this dungeon contains valuable treasure. It would be more than enough to pad your savings account in between opportunities.”
“And there’s nothing more stress relieving than killing monsters,” Raph adds.
April looks between them, a reluctant grin playing at her lips. “Alright, fine, I’m in.”
Donnie discreetly untenses. At least something’s going right today. Though it was vexing, messing up step two earlier wasn’t the end of the world. Messing up step three, on the other hand… it’s a good thing April’s resume is as weak as her ability to resist her little brothers.
They polish off their lunch and race each other to the alleyway, tripping and shoving each other. Thanks to Donnie’s forward thinking, it takes them little time to pack their supplies and weapons, and soon, they’re following Raph out the back door into the Lost Woods, dungeon-attuned compass in hand.
“Are we there yet?” Leo complains, barely thirty minutes in.
Donnie glares at him, though he doesn’t enjoy hiking any more than his twin does. He hates the droning, biting insects; the underbrush scratching and grabbing at him; the muggy, occasionally olfactorily offensive air. Donnie hadn’t retrofitted his family’s cottage with electricity and running water because of his great love of the natural world. Moreover, the Lost Woods hadn’t earned its name by providing safe passage for its travelers, and if they have to backtrack one more previously nonexistent dead-end, he’s setting this entire place on fire.
Donnie taps his magitech gauntlet, projecting his incomplete map of the woods. Something withers inside him as he sees how little progress they’ve made, but admitting his own longing for his air-conditioned lab would mean that he and Leo were of the same mind. Instead, he taunts, “Why, getting tired already?”
Leo’s eye twitches. “Tired, me? I could go all day.”
“Quit dragging your feet back there,” Raph calls over his shoulder as he hacks at the low branches with his hand-axe. “Don’t focus on the small stuff. Remember, it’s the destination, not the journey.”
“That’s not the saying,” Donnie tries, but his correction is, as always, dismissed.
As they trek through the woods, trails thinning and mist deepening, Donnie keeps one eye on his compass and the other on the future nearly within reach. With a dungeon under their belt, they will officially become adventurers and gain all the privileges attached to the name. “Oh, Donnie!” the mods of the online artificer guild will cry, falling to their knees. “We can’t believe our application portal ever automatically rejected you for ‘lack of real-world experience.’ Please, forgive us, and bless our guild with your boundless genius!”
Donnie will wait a calculated 2.31 business days to respond. He may have gone fourteen years without meeting a single like-minded intellectual peer (full-offense to his brothers), but he can’t look desperate. That reminds him, he hasn’t touched his application since the last time ‘Othello von Ryan’ emailed them, politely asking for an exception to be made. The mental revisions almost distract him from his aching feet.
Eventually, the woods grow wild enough that they need to take a break and regroup, at which point Raph pulls out the rope. Tying it twice round her waist, April laments, “I almost wish I grew up in the Lost Woods with y’all. I feel like I’m wearing one of those toddler leashes.”
As the strongest, heaviest member of the party, Raph is the most appropriate anchor. He takes the trailing end of the rope from her, then pauses. “Donnie, how much longer till we reach the dungeon?”
“Twenty minutes.” Mikey whips his head around and stares at Donnie pointedly, whatever that means. “Maybe closer to forty if we run into another big detour.”
“Yeah, we’re all chaining up,” Raph decides, pulling out more rope. Mikey, pouting at Donnie as if he’s the unreasonable one between them, allows the tether to be looped beneath his crossed arms. “No arguments. None of us have been this deep in the woods before, and Raph ain’t taking any chances this close to the finish line.”
His stern order interrupts Mikey, mouth open to put his littlest brother word it. Mulishly, he says, “But I get to be last when we’re on our way back. I’m just as strong as Leo!” Raph just chuckles and tightens the knot at his waist.
Donnie tuts in mocking sympathy to his twin. “I hadn’t realized how weak you’d grown, brother. Perhaps you should cede Jupiter Jim: Planet Gargula #3 to me and join Raph at the weight rack.”
Leo smirks, then calls out, “Mikey, this guy thinks you can’t lift him.”
“I never—” But it’s too late. Their little brother has already swept Donnie into a bridal carry, clutching him tight like one of Raph’s stuffed toys.
“Told you I could do it!”
Donnie sighs. “Yes, very impressive. Now put me down.”
Daisy chained together, they continue down increasingly narrow paths. Raph carefully alternates between studying the compass and the tangle of flora ahead, hand-axe at the ready, leaving the rest of them to chat about Mikey’s latest culinary experiment. The woods try a few times to lead them astray with the odd sourceless animal call, creeping vine, or illusory sign post, but between the steady footing of their eldest brother and the guidance of Donnie’s invention, it doesn’t stand a chance.
Blades of vibrant grass begin poking through the dirty leaf litter underfoot, such an unnatural sight in the Lost Woods that they must be closing on the dungeon. The closer they get, the lusher and greener it becomes, until it forms a carpet that would be luxurious were it not surely crawling with ants. Donnie swears he even hears snatches of birdsong, even though the Lost Woods devoured the last of the chirping fools years ago. April and Mikey turn their faces up into the light, but Donnie, Leo, and Raph, well-trained by a childhood tiptoeing along the paths, wind tenser with each merrily bobbing wildflower.
The now wide, sunlit paths give way to the glade reluctantly hosting the dungeon, and the sight of it stops Raph in his tracks. Even though the domino of squashed noses almost pushes Donnie over the edge, he doesn’t begrudge his older brother his reaction.
“It’s a giant pumpkin,” Mikey exclaims, stars in his eyes. “Oh man, I could make so many pies with this.”
The mottled blue-green gourd is as wide as their cottage and four times as tall, wedged into the forest like a baseball into a birthday cake. Orange bubble windows interrupt the graceful curvature of its walls, the only sign that this is a building and not a botanical miracle. Ivy, as thick around as his waist, trails from its stem into the Lost Woods, where it appears to be attempting to root. Donnie is eager to see who will win: the semi-sentient, entirely malicious, and eternally hungry woods, or the out-of-towner reeking of delightful fairy tale magic.
With relish, Donnie says, “See? A dungeon, just like I told you. You may applaud now.”
Raph grins widely at Donnie, who can’t help standing a little taller. “A real life dungeon! I can’t believe it. Good work, little brother.” He slings a heavy arm around Donnie’s shoulders and turns them around to face the rest of the party. “Everybody, this is it. We’ve been training our whole lives to become adventurers, and we finally have the chance to prove ourselves. Who’s ready?”
“I was born ready,” April says, smacking her baseball bat against her palm. “Those monsters won’t know what hit ‘em.”
Mikey cheers, “We ‘bout to make pumpkin pie outta this dungeon!”
Even Leo’s bouncing on his toes, a little smirk supplanting his eternally bored expression. “Let’s get this party started.”