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extrasfromthevoid · 9 months ago

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Draxum's Hamato Yoshi's Accidental Child Acquisition (part 5/?)

@tmntbestsibscompetiton

Summary: Hamato Yoshi--or, Lou Jitsu--meets a curious little girl in the depths of a madman's lab that turns his perception of the world on its head.

Yoshi has grown fairly numb to the atrocities of yokai. A decade trapped in a gilded cage that doubled as a gladiatorial ring will unfortunately do that. Of course, now Yoshi has traded one prison for another: Big Mama for this Baron Draxum fellow. Part of him knows that letting the little flying rat monkeys take him from his cell in the Battle Nexus without a fight was a bad idea that will lead to nothing but pain. But Yoshi can’t bring himself to care anymore. He’s sick of fighting. All it has done is land him in cages and endless, pointless blood sport.

Such things become unappealing very quickly.

“Ah, the great Lou Jitsu,” a tall goat-like yokai crows. “Your warrior prowess is legendary."

Yoshi grimaces. “My fighting days are behind me.”

Draxum smirks unnervingly. “Fighting will not be necessary,” he says. “Only your innate genetic gifts.”

He grits his teeth, the bars creaking ominously in his hands. He opened his mouth to rebuke but something interrupts that Yoshi couldn’t have anticipated.

“Baba!” A painfully young voice calls.

Yoshi’s heart drops as footsteps echo down the hall outside the lab and a young girl no older than four and clearly human rounds the corner. Her arms and hands are wrapped in a way that supports good wrist and knuckle alignment, a thin sheen of sweat adhering her tussled hair to her forehead and something that looks uncomfortably like blood smeared on her cheek and staining her outfit. In a moment, the hard shell of apathy surrounding Yoshi’s heart creaks.

She stops in front of Draxum, holding up a thick scroll she can barely put both hands around and a squirming, pulsing mound of pink-purple matter, a poorly cleaned tanto blade strapped to her hip.

“I’m done with practice!” She says brightly, smiling broadly.

Draxum nods and takes the scroll. He then pulls out a rather comical pair of reading bifocals as the girl bounces on the balls of her feet in front of him. As the large yokai looks over the scroll, the girl occasionally steals a look towards Yoshi. She waves at him. Numbly, Yoshi waves back.

“Baba, can I show Mr. Jitsu my little brothers?” She asks.

Draxum holds up a finger at her, still reading the scroll. When he seems finished, he then turns his attention to the weird pulsating ball of plant matter the girl brought with her with a critical eye.

“Hmm. Your work today was most excellent, Spawn,” he says, tucking away his glasses and rolling up the scroll. “You may. After you wash and change.”

The little girl literally jumps for joy. “Yes!! Thank you, Baba!” She says as she scampers away, leaving that weird lump of whatever it is behind in her excitement.

“Do not run in the halls!” Draxum shouts after her.

Judging from the rapid pitter patter of tiny bare feet, the little girl doesn’t heed Draxum’s strangely paternal words. He sighs heavily, pinching his brow before setting aside the scroll and picking up the weird lump of matter to set along side it on the lab table. It leaves a strange puddle of translucent purple liquid where the girl left it on the floor. Draxum sighs again at the sight of it, muttering about the messes of children.

For a moment, Yoshi almost forgets exactly what kind of monster he’s looking at.

But that moment passes quickly as a smirk grows on Draxum’s alien features as he sees the shocked and horrified look on Yoshi’s face.

“You fiend!” Yoshi hisses, the vines creaking in his grip. “What are you doing to that child?”

Draxum has the nerve to turn that smirk at him. “I am molding her into the future general of my armies,” he declares. “Her mystic prowess is remarkable for a human, especially one of her age. And under my tutelage, she will become the greatest mystic warrior the world has ever seen! She will lead the armies I make from your DNA to take back the surface for yokai-kind, and I will relish the irony that a human will be the one to spearhead the extermination of the human race.”

Yoshi’s veins fill with ice. “How dare you…,” he growls.

The bastard’s smirk widens and he sweeps out of the room.

Yoshi is left alone for some time, pulling uselessly at the bars as the minutes slip by.

The little girl returns some time after Draxum leaves, hair damp and wearing a deep green kimono. In her arms is a large blue tub that is almost too large for her to get her arms around. She marches into the lab with an expression of the utmost concentration as she struggles with her load.

“You should not be here, little one,” Yoshi says grimly.

The girl sets the tub down and sits in front of Yoshi’s cage, her bright smile dimmed slightly by confusion.

“Why not? Baba said I can be in here. I just can’t touch stuff,” she says.

Yoshi reaches through the bars to take her hand. “You’re in danger. Draxum will only turn you and your little brothers into a living weapons for his cause!”

The girl blinks. “But I want to fight,” she says.

Yoshi balks a little at this.

“There’s bad things coming, Mr. Jitsu. Really, really bad! A lot of people will get hurt if we don’t stop it!” She declares. Then she looks at him with hopeful eyes. “You’ll help fight, right, Mr. Jitsu?”

Yoshi flinches slightly. “I have sworn off violence, little one,” he says.

She frowns. “But you’re the best fighter ever! If anyone could beat the Mean Metal Man, it’d be you!”

Yoshi blinks. “‘Mean Metal Man’?” He echoes. “What are you talking about?”

She pulls a small folded stack of paper out of her kimono’s sash and unfolds them for Yoshi to see. He feels his heart stop as a very familiar image stares back at him in the unsteady lines of a child’s art.

The girl taps the drawing, a hard and somber look on her face. “I see the Mean Metal Man a lot in my visions,” she says. “He hurts a lot of people and then he brings these scary pink brain things and the whole world dies!”

It is my duty to keep watch for the return of the Shredder.

Some day, you will understand the sacrifice we must make as Hamato.

You must complete your training, so you can defeat the Shredder, should he ever return.

The little girl continues to ramble as Yoshi feels his entire world crumble around him. There’s no way that his Grandpa Sho was right. The Shredder…he can’t be real. He can’t.

Because that would mean that Yoshi has wasted his life and shunned his dwindling family for nothing.

Anatawa Hitorijanai.

“The Metal Man is scary, but I know you could beat him and maybe you could team up with this really strong lady I see sometimes!”

“How do you know all this, little one?” Yoshi asks, still stunned.

“I see them in visions when I sleep. It’s not always the same thing over and over, but it’s similar,” she says. “Baba says I’m an Or…” her brow furrows as she struggles with the word. “Orc-al?”

“Oracle,” Yoshi supplies.

The girl nods. “Yeah! That! I see things that’ll happen in the future.”

“That must be a heavy burden to bear.”

The girl nods again, visibly somber. “It’s scary. I don’t always see bad things, but the bad things are really, really bad,” she admits, pulling her knees to her chest. “I wake up crying a lot…”

Yoshi’s heart pangs with sympathy. Visions of coming disaster is a cruel thing for the universe to thrust upon someone so young.

“And you still want to confront the monsters you see?”

She tilts her head. “‘Com-front’? What’s that?”

“Confront,” Yoshi corrects. “It means to face something. Usually an opponent of some kind.”

The little girl makes a drawn out “oh” sound, understanding. “Like how you’d fight in the Battle Nexus! You were com-fronting your oppon-ments in the Nexus!” She says, fumbling the pronunciation of a few words rather adorably for the subject matter.

“Uh…yeah,” Yoshi says, a little unnerved that this very young girl has apparently seen his often bloody Nexus fights. “But…back to you…do you really want to confront the scary things you see in your visions?”

The girl nods sharply with very little hesitation, a determination burning bright in her hazel eyes. “I can’t just sit around and watch it happen! Not when I can do something about it,” she declares. “Baba’s training me for this! So I gotta do it! And the Mean Metal Man…he’s coming and bringing all the bad things with him.”

Yoshi’s blood runs cold. “How soon?”

How much time did Yoshi have to prepare?

The girl frowns and looks away. “Soon, but not ‘tomorrow’ soon,” she says.

“Years?” Yoshi suggests.

The girl nods. “Fingers and toes number,” she says. Then she frowns. “Maybe? I’m not sure.”

“But it won’t happen soon soon?”

She shakes her head.

That’s a relief. At least there’s time.

“So…little one,” Yoshi says quietly, still reeling from the revelation that the destiny Grandpa Sho harped about constantly was actually true and imminent according to this young child who is apparently both blessed and cursed with knowledge of impending doom, “where are your little brothers?”

To his surprise, she reaches into the tub she brought in with her and pulls out a small green creature.

“Right here!” She says brightly.

In her hands is a small red-earred slider turtle that fits neatly in her cradled palms. He’s fully retracted into his shell but the adorable little creature is pulling himself out again, sniffing the girl’s fingers and wandering closer to Yoshi, evidently curious.

“Aww,” Yoshi coos, feeling a bit of his earlier tension receding as he reaches out to scratch the tiny turtle’s head. It chirps sweetly. “Aren’t you cute? But, little one, I don’t understand. Are your little brothers…turtles?”

She nods. “Baba says he’s going to do science on them and they’ll fight with me some day,” she explains. “He says they’ll be my sub-ordain-ants—whatever that is—but that sounds boring, so I wanna be their big sister instead.”

“I…see…,” Yoshi says, only half lying. He can’t say he’s fond of the notion that Draxum is planning to mutate these innocent creatures.

“This is Blue,” she says handing him the slider.

Yoshi coos a little as the little turtle fits easily in the palm of his hand. Little brothers indeed.

The girl pulls the bin closer, allowing Yoshi to peer inside a bit better, before pulling out an ornate box turtle.

“This is Orange. He’s very sweet,” she points to a soft-shelled turtle, “That’s Purple. He bites sometimes, but only when he’s scared, but other than that he’s very sweet too!” She sets down the box turtle in her lap—the little creature happily nestling into her warm kimono—and pulls out a baby alligator snapping turtle, holding him with both hand on either side. “And this is Red!”

Yoshi reaches out to give the little turtle a scratch on the head too. “Aww, what a sweet little c—“

The baby turtle lives up to his species’ name and snaps at Yoshi’s finger, digging through the fabric of his glove and piercing his skin.

Yoshi shouts in pain, yanking his finger back.

“Ye-ouch! Why you little—!”

The girl laughs brightly and pulls the little creature back. It takes Yoshi’s glove with him, which only causes the girl to dissolve further into peels of laughter. And Yoshi can’t help but join her. The sight of a tiny snapping turtle with no thoughts behind his eyes and a bright orange glove in his beak is a comical one.

At least until the tiny creature tries to eat it.

The girl composes herself somewhat as she readjusts her hold to free one of her hands in order to grab the item before little Red can swallow it.

“No, Red! That’s not food,” she scolds lightly, tugging the glove out of his beak. However, the fabric on the glove’s index finger tears off, still firmly clamped in the tiny turtle’s jaws. The girl looks between the turtle and the now ripped glove in dismay. “Oops. Sorry, Mr. Jitsu.”

Yoshi chuckles, reaching forward to pry the shred of glove from the small snapping turtle’s mouth. “It’s okay, little one,” he assures. “I can always mend it later.”

She tilts her head. “Like sewing?”

He nods. “I had to sew a lot of my own costumes,” he says with no small amount of pride.

The girl’s eyes shine with wonder.

Sewing is a much easier topic for Yoshi to talk about than fighting in the Nexus or the prospect of The Shredder’s return and actually being real. Growing up, Yoshi had precious few hobbies between schooling and Grandpa Sho’s training that he stalwartly ignored, so sewing things was a treasured reprieve. It came in handy during his days of stardom as he gleefully tells the girl. At first, Yoshi made his own costumes out of necessity but when he hit it big, the costume department just couldn’t make the costume the way Yoshi liked it despite their best efforts. It’s been a while since he’s sown, however. Yoshi hasn’t had much contact with a needle and thread outside those of the surgical variety. He’d like to sew again someday.

And in any case, the girl is utterly enraptured by Yoshi’s descriptions of the things he’s made. Eventually, Yoshi runs out of sewing tales, but the girl takes over with a slew of facts about turtles. She speaks with undisguised passion and joy, her hands flapping rapidly in front of her and eyes shining.

Admittedly, Yoshi doesn’t get a lot of it. The girl talks fast and her English is flawed, occasionally even cutting into an archaic iteration of Japanese. Regardless, the pure love and excitement is soothing to listen to.

Unfortunately, their conversation doesn’t last forever as Draxum returns at last.

Yoshi glowers at the yokai, but the girl’s face blooms into a joyful smile that Draxum is wholly unworthy of. Curiously, Draxum’s expression softens ever so slightly as he looks down at the young girl.

“I thought I’d find you here, Spawn,” he says. “It’s time for dinner.”

The girl nods and gently returns her little brothers to their tub. She pauses and looks up at Draxum. “Can Mr. Jitsu join us, Baba?” She pleads, giving him the biggest, wateriest eyes Yoshi has ever born witness to.

“Please..?”

The stalwart yokai actually falters visibly.

Ah. I see she is a master of the ancient art of puppy-dog eyes, Yoshi thinks.

However, Draxum visibly steels his nerves and pats the young girl on the head placatingly.

“Not today, Spawn,” he says. “Come along.”

The girl pouts and casts a longing, sorrowful look towards Yoshi before trailing after Draxum.

And…Yoshi is alone again.

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#void's writing #rottmnt oc: milo hamato #tmnt best siblings competition #rottmnt #rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles #teenage mutant ninja turtles #writing this conversation between yoshi and spawn was really fun bc spawn is just a lil gal who happens to drop lore bombs on this poor man #splinter is a bit more proactive about the whole training/preparation thing w milo in the picture #not by much admittedly bc depression and all that but he makes more of an effort training the boys #now if only milo didnt continuously try to shoulder the burden of this coming calamity herself...

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