1998-07 – Letters from Donatello

Cybersalutations!

We’re back from a little trip we took half-way across the globe! I love the Summer, as it’s the one time each year we make sure to take a nice long vacation together. Of course, since trouble always seems to be on our trail, none of our trips are ever as relaxing and care-free as we had hoped for… but I suppose that we’ve gotten used to it by now! This year’s vacation was certainly no exception!

After traveling to Australia in the recent past, we still had our “sea legs” about us, and so we decided to give Venus a surprise and visit her village in China! She’s been a real trooper since her arrival in New York, and while she rarely (if ever) complained, we could see in her eyes how much she missed her humble home. New York City is a far cry from a remote village in the Chinese mountains!

First things first, we had to determine how we would get there. The Blimp and other airships were ruled out, as there’s just too much air space and too many hostile satellites (and air forces) to deal with in the regions that we were heading into. The natural choice seemed to be our sub… so that’s what we decided on. The biggest problem is, the sub was constructed to fit only 5 passengers… with Venus along, it would be a very uncomfortable trip, indeed! I thought about expanding the quarters of the vehicle, but that would have taken weeks… so we needed a better solution.

Wacky gadgets to the rescue!

Over the years we’ve found quite a few strange devices of alien origin (thanks to Krang… boy… never thought I’d say that!), and I’ve done a little inventing here and there… so for the trip, I thought that a “Shrink Ray” might come in handy. We’ve run across a few of these devices in our past, so I figured that I had enough experience to repair one that I’d stored away a few years back. Shrinking each of us a bit smaller so that we could comfortably fit into the Turtle Sub seemed to be a quickest solution (perhaps no simpler in the greater scheme of things… but certainly “easier” time-wise). So I grabbed the non-functioning Shrink unit and set about repairing it while the others prepared for a LONG vacation… which would become more of an adventure than we had hoped for!

Shrinking technology is one of the strangest things I’ve worked with, and to be honest with you, I still really don’t understand exactly how it works. It seems simple on the surface (well… as simple as quasi-quantum electrodynamics can be)… but the more I delve into it, the more complex it seems to become… which is often the case with everything I do. I did manage to get the Shrinker working with relative good control (calculations and results were off by about .0018%… worrisome, but hey… we’ve taken bigger risks than that in the past). My biggest fear wasn’t shrinking us… but returning us to normal size afterwards! We’ve had some serious problems with this sort of thing. Nonetheless, I used the Shrinker to reduce us all 25%… which made the sub more than large enough to hold our new smaller selves. Being about a foot shorter is whacky… but it didn’t cause us too many problems. We planned to “re-size” up once we hit Shanghai, Venus’ home town.

I’ll let the others explain what happened next. It’s good to be home and typing to you once again!

Your friend,
Donatello

Master Splinter

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