Notes

book one: introduction of the averages/outliers thing, Raph and donnie have a heart to heart and establish their middle children understanding. Raph also reveals to Leo that donnie is made to feel insecure about his place on the team. plot wise: they retrieve the teleporter and the meteorite

book two: the middle children are still at odds with the others. donnie and Leo butt heads more often as the plot progresses, while Raph tries to steer Leo toward backing off. later, Leo and donnie have a heart to heart where Leo reveals HIS insecurities and donnie reassures him. Raph also apologizes to Mikey for the b-team thing. plot wise: the rock turns into a baby stone golem which eats the teleporter and kidnaps Mikey. Leo and donnie butt heads over the best way to deal with this. they rescue their brothers, contain the golem, and resolve to send it back to dimension X. Mikey names it stonefist. in an epilogue, Mikey comes to bother donnie, who can tell he wants to talk and waits him out. Mikey reveals that Raph apologized for belittling him and how happy that made him. donnie apologizes, too, for making him feel stupid, then says that Mikey is his best friend and will alway be, and in his mind there's no one he'd rather have watching his back than Mikey. they hug and make up (and now all that's left is the confrontation with Leo hu hu hu)

book three: a simple patrol goes really wrong when, during a rainstorm, the team is separated and injured. Casey, who has a head wound, and donnie, who has a sprained ankle, fall off of a building and are hunted by a contingent of footbots. meanwhile Raph and Mikey must deal with another experimental Kraang robot, a stealth machine with the same learning capacities as the footbots who hunts them over the rooftops. Donnie and Casey make it home first and get Leo, who was helping splinter train April. donnie and Casey stay in the lair while April and Leo go help the others. First chapter: Mikey and Raph, unable to go home lest they lead the robot back, being hunted to exhaustion for hours throughout the night, phones broken, weapons useless. eventually Leo and April come to the rescue; April uses her psychic powers to locate the robot and Leo destroys it, then helps them back to the lair. Second chapter: donnie's and Casey's shorter adventure of struggling home and dealing with the footbots, of donnie taking care of their wounds, of the others returning, and of donnie finally revealing his biggest secret. the brothers confirm their familiar relationship and reassure him.

book four: donnie says that since they can't destroy stonefist, which he froze, they have to send it back to dimension x. to do this, they'll need to steal a Kraang portal device, so they get the whole team together and plan a mission to infiltrate TCRI headquarters and find one. after his talk with donnie, Leo decides to ask for their input, so they have a team meeting where they decide together what to do, with input from splinter and the humans occasionally. donnie reveals a small teleporter he made from the stripped down parts from the larger one. the plan is this: Casey and April sneak into the lobby during the day under the guise of taking a tour or something, then plant the locator part of donnie's teleporter. that night, the four brothers teleport in, with April and Casey on standby as backup. Raph and Mikey stage a frontal assault on the lobby as a distraction, and Leo and donnie sneak into the building. donnie figures they have storage units somewhere, probably not on the top floor. he has metalhead's Kraang computer processor, and uses it to hack into a computer and hack into the system. they are caught, they hide, and they impersonate the way the Kraang talk to trick the lone sentry, who accepts their excuse and tells them where the portals are held. they kill the Kraang, snatch a teleporter, and escape. Mikey and Raph do not escape. in the shell raiser, the Kraang communication orb is going nuts. donnie discovers that the Kraang are holding Mikey and Raph hostage in hopes of drawing out the other two, Leo makes a comment that at least the b-team members have an a-team member to keep things on track, donnie blows up at him, April and Casey come to his defense, and donnie silent all the way home. April and Casey follow donnie into his lab and comfort him, but during their conversation he comes to the conclusion that they're dating secretly, and he's so upset that he shuts himself down and makes them leave. he cries, but only for a bit, and then he goes back out to make a plan with Leo.

book five: donnie convinces Leo that the best thing to do is to simply sneak in, grab Mikey and Raph, and sneak out. the teleporter locator is still in the building, so after replenishing their supplies, they teleport in and begin making their way up to the top, where they suspect the other two are being held. they're both really tense and efficient, and the others notice this but don't comment on it as they grapple their way back to the ground. donnie realizes Raph has a tracker on his shell, and he makes them stay on the move as he checks them over. he finds another tracker hidden on Mikey, then they go home. they figure out how to open the portal and send stonefist through it. donnie puts the portal in his compartment of super dangerous stuff so his brothers can't get in, and then he says goodnight to everyone and shuts himself in his lab and locks it. Raph is pissed because donnie's obviously upset and he and Mikey figure Leo did something, so they go to Casey and April, who tell them what happened before they leave, and then Raph and Mikey confront Leo, who blows up defensively. but the other two are persistent and eventually Leo reveals that he and donnie (and he and Raph) have talked about it before, and he said it out of habit and then was too stubborn to take it back. the other two tell him that he needs to get his head out of his shell, watch what he says, and apologize to Donnie. so he does, and donnie talks a bit more about his feelings of inferiority, and Leo talks him through it and then donnie explains he's also upset about Casey and April. Leo hesitates but says April and Casey are dating as much as April and donnie are dating, which just confuses donnie, who thanks Leo for apologizing but kicks him out to brood.

book six: April and Casey, with Raph's help, finally decide to confront their mutual affections for each other and for Donatello, and come up with a plan to ask donnie out on the best date ever. this becomes about a million times more difficult when donnie is possessed by a mutant motorcycle. OR: while out with Mikey and Leo testing the shell raiser and stealth cycle's new (something?? navigational matrix?? weapons capabilities?? who knows), donnie accidentally rides the stealth bike through a puddle of mutagen. the stealth bike mutates and drives off, with a possessed donnie in tow. he calls about an hour later and informs them that the bike seems to delight in causing car accidents, but that one such accident launched him off the bike and luckily he regained his mind. unfortunately, the bike ate someone else and is now using them as a driver. Casey comes up with the brilliant idea to challenge it to a race, but the only vehicles they have are the go karts and the shell raiser. donnie installs the personal teleporter onto one of the go karts and they challenge the bike to a race. they win by cheating, the bike is pissed and tries to eat donnie again, but Casey and April hold it at bay until the others can crash the go karts into it, knocking donnie off AGAIN. they trash the motorcycle and dump it in the river. obviously donnie's hurt and bummed, but he says maybe now instead of go karts he can make a fleet of six motorcycles. Casey offers to help him with that, April offers to keep them company, both of them wink unsubtly at Raph, donnie sees this and begins to cotton on, and everyone goes home more or less happy.

book seven: April and Casey finally try to confront donnie about their feelings for him, but donnie, who has a hint of what they want and is kind of worried about it, kind of avoids them by burying himself in his work. this becomes much more difficult when a new mutant arises with the power to deage people. now donnie, Casey, and April (with assistance from master splinter) are left in charge of raph, Leo, and Mikey, who are probably about six or seven years old, rambunctious as hell, and determined to hunt down the mutant who did this to them (except for Mikey, who's living his best life as splinter's little baby again). donnie is forced to spend time with April and casey, and this ends in a big blowout where he says he thinks they're dating, and they tell him they like him, and he kind of panics and runs away. of course, then they're captured by the mutant, who wants to use them as babysitters for her legion of babies, and she also gets her hands on the turtle tots, who snuck out after donnie. so donnie and splinter team up to take down the mutant, return everyone to their proper ages, etc. etc. (there's a moment where donnie bursts into the warehouse thing and leaps between casey & April and the mutant thing, growling how they don't belong to her, that they're his, and that's kind of the moment where he's like oh fuck, I guess this is happening).

book eight: in the aftermath of Karai's mutation, the whole family sets out to look for her. Leo and donnie split up into two teams and they take turns going on long, boring patrols for a while (days? weeks?) before they finally find karai. trapping her is another matter entirely, and then it takes a long time for donnie to make a retromutagen, because he says stockman was experimenting with the mutagen and he doesn't know what it did to her. meanwhile splinter bonds with karai, and so do all the rest of them, though Leo is kind of afraid to go to her. eventually it's raph who convinces him to see her, and karai calms the heck down and just kind of slithers around the lair, flicking her tongue out at things. she gets along great with everyone, including April once she apologizes. when donnie finally does create the retromutagen, he can't hide the fact that he was able to use his own blood to do so, and he finally has to explain that he's genetically related to splinter while the other turtles aren't. this is. . . kind of a shock to everyone except for splinter, who already knew, and though donnie's worried it'll make things awkward or worse, they're all just like "I mean. . . explains why ur tall as fuck lmao". he does not create a retromutagen, but he comes up with a partial form that allows karai to switch between forms.

book nine: they get a call from Leatherhead, who's been trapped in dimension x. he tells them that the invasion is ready, Mikey hops into dimension x, the others follow (this time Mikey admits he was there alone for months, and the others are actually horrified and sympathetic). anyway, they let Mikey take the lead, they rescue Leatherhead, they blow up the factory, they go home to prepare and tell the others what's going on. donnie and Leo get into a huge fight about the best way to handle this while the others watch, shocked, but eventually they agree to a compromise: they'll prepare to make a last stand, but then they book it. so April tells her dad to get out of the city, and he goes out to the farmhouse to prepare for their arrival, and donnie goes with casey to explain to his dad and little sister what's going on, and his dad is obviously freaked out (and the sister thinks donnie is the coolest thing ever, and demands he pick her up, and refuses to come down for like twenty minutes). Casey's dad eventually agrees to leave and says that they'll go to Casey's grandparents' place further south, and tries to convince casey to come, but casey says that he's been fighting alongside the turtles for months now and that he has to defend his home. donnie promises to keep casey safe (after trying and failing to convince casey to go) and the dad reluctantly agrees. they give Casey's dad April's dad's number and explain about the farmhouse, casey promises to stay in touch, he has a tearful goodbye, and then they go back to the lair, so that donnie can begin making weapons of war.

book ten: the invasion comes about two weeks after book nine. donnie has barely slept in all this time. all of the mutants in New York city have been preparing, the turtles, April, and casey have been training with splinter practically nonstop, and donnie's enlisted everyone's help to make weapons, and it's a verifiable army of every bit of experimental tech he's ever created, low-key. they of course have metalhead, and with the mutagen karai found in book eight he makes a bunch more flash freeze bombs. he makes rocket launchers, works with casey to upgrade his armor and tasers into actual weaponry, builds a laser sword, adds a second holster across his shell for a tech bo he's built. they're all just kind of in awe because damn donnie? Mikey says that donnie's kind of a super villain, and donnie doesn't argue. so like before, it's April who starts the invasion when she brings irma to the lair, the lair is destroyed, splinter stays to hold down the fort. raph, casey, and karai are out, Leo gets separated from the others in the tunnels, and donnie is injured. donnie calls everyone and tells them to meet at April's apartment. they go, and then Leo comes flying in through the window. casey takes the partywagon back to a manhole cover to keep him safe, meanwhile the others manage to hold the foot at bay, then attack Kraang prime. then they get a call from casey saying that splinter was fighting shredder in the sewers and was injured (but casey saved him! love this little trash man) so now they've got two injured teammates, they escape Kraang prime, and they start driving out of the city, toward the farm house. someone says that the plan worked. someone else says that it still feels like they lost.