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"You usually win, and I assume you've spent the past year preparing for exactly this moment," Don replies, as he settles onto the floor.

It's a joke, and yet, consciously or not, there's a germ of hurt in it. Leo has been doing something for the past year - getting older, getting wiser, practicing anything and everything in his obsessive, obstinate, admirable way - while Don didn't even know he was gone. It's a concept Don is still trying to swallow, more difficult even than brothers from another dimension, or evil techno-organic entities, or mysterious powers thinking that slightly-upgraded tech could coax him to live apart from his family.

Don makes an opening move on the chessboard, as he ponders his conversational gambit.

The leaflet of hurt in his brother's voice surprises him, but he does nothing to show it other than cant his head slightly to the side as Don sits down. Something about this past year is upsetting to Don - and Leo can take a guess as to why. It's a whole chapter of his and Raph's lives that he's missed out on. A year, just a year, but they know better than anyone how much can happen in that time.

What exactly has happened is a floodgate that Leo isn't big enough to open. Even when he feels it hanging like a chasm between him and Donatello, he's still not sure of how to cross it... or if he even wants to.

He makes his own move without hesitation. His chess-playing style has changed over the year, too, and he isn't sure why that of all things makes him feel guiltiest.

"Are you doing all right?" Don asks, as he studies this move. He is fairly confident that the answer is no, but his observational and deductive skills haven't gotten him much beyond that. He could go for Why won't you tell me what's going on or Where have you been sneaking off to at night, but Leo rarely responds well to frontal assaults. Letting him take control of a conversation - or at least think he's taking control - tends to yield much better results.

"Fine," he replies without missing a beat; perhaps a bit too quickly, even. His turn finished, he sits up straight and crosses his arms. "Your move."

There's no bite at all to it, but Leo is clearly prepared to counter ambiguous questions with ambiguous answers.

Trust Leo to play aggressive chess and be conversationally defensive at the same time. Just noticing the conflicting strategies is almost enough to make Don's head hurt, as he opens a trap on the board.

"Are you sure?" he presses. "You've seemed down lately."

Leo studies the board for a while this time. It's not precisely that he's having trouble picking his next move - he's played chess with his brother for years now, and one year apart will hardly undo his memory of Donatello's play style.

It's just that his style is so different.

After a few heartbeats, he picks up a Bishop and plays away from the trap - a more traditional Leo move.

"This city is in the middle of a war, and we got laid out for over a week," he says carefully, eyes fixed on his Bishop. "I guess I've just been going a little stir crazy."

It's not a lie; he practically dragged Mike out of the house not too long ago after being on lockdown for so long.

Interesting choices, Leo.

"What do you want to do?" Don asks. About the situation in the city, that is. The question comes with an unspoken What do you want me to do? He's been working on some of his own projects, but it's mostly a positioning move - making sure he has the technical knowledge he'll need to carry out any orders his brother gives him.

Eh, mood swings.

His eyes narrow at the question. What do they do, indeed. If Monet were still here, Leo would ask if she's heard anything from her people - contacts who Leo isn't even sure exist anymore. It had been foolish to rely on her as his primary source of information; he has his own connections here and there, but nothing like she did.

Leo gives a soft exhale, tinged with frustration around the edges, and steeples his hands. "I lost my most important..." he grimaces. "...contact a while ago. She had her own feelers throughout the city - if I can track them down, we may finally have a starting point."

Which means, until he figures out what the hell is going on, he actually doesn't have anything for you. But Don himself has always been better at sticking his nose into things than anyone gave him credit for. Leo's eyes finally flicker up towards his brother. "What have you heard?"

It bothers Don that he doesn't know who Leo's friends are these days - partly because he's not used to being excluded from his brothers' lives that way, partly because Leo doesn't have the best track record where making friends is concerned.

"I found out that - the thing in the palace, is a techno-organic construct that may have been spawned from the networks themselves." He rubs the ridge between his eyes. "Which explains a lot about the virus. Beyond that, I can tell you anything you want to know about Communicative Technologies of Keeliai."

Maybe some of which can be useful in tracking down Leo's "contacts"?

"Techno-organic?" That seems to catch Leo's attention, because he drops his hands and fixes his brother with a quizzical look. "Like the Utroms' technology?"

"Yes. And no." His gaze drifts up from the increasingly-hopeless situation on the chessboard. "Even more advanced, maybe."

More advanced? Leo's brow line furrows at that, his gaze sliding off to the side as he mulls it over. Technology more advanced than the Utroms'... that shouldn't be surprising, really, considering what he's seen this world is capable of. It just always seemed to feel like they'd hit the ceiling long ago with Utrom technology.

And if it was spawned from the Network... that opens up a whole new can of privacy-violating-worms that stretches way further back than some cybernetic Cthulu.

This is going to be a headache.

"Okay," he says, moving a knight. "Tell me about these Communicative Technologies. Layman's terms, Donnie."

As play passes back and forth and the number of pieces on the board dwindles, Don tells Leo what he knows. He starts with an overview of how the consoles work, moves on to the radio system, and covers what he and Aya have been attempting to do with the Green Lantern Energy. Along the way he mentions what he's picked up about kedan communication systems, relevant special abilities of Foreigners, and some noteworthy technology from the homeworlds of those who have been brought here.

He doesn't entirely manage to stick to "layman's terms", but his dissertation ought to be about 90% comprehensible.

Even with Don disassembling it as best he can, there's a lot of information to take in; Leo is silent throughout the entire explanation, doing little more than trading moves on the board. He's heard a little about the Green Lanterns, but their involvement doesn't interest him nearly as much as the prospects Don is practically putting in front of him on a silver platter.

"Check," he notes as he moves his remaining rook. With that, he looks up from the board, his focus shifting solely to Donatello. "So you really think you can do this? Mock up some kind of... underground communications network?"

Don spreads his hands. "No one ever noticed the Shell Cells, did they?" Never mind that this network would need to serve hundreds of people throughout a huge city: that Don would need to manufacture and distribute devices for them all, that he couldn't possibly sit with each person to patiently teach them how to operate the system, that the traffic load on the network would be a technical obstacle beyond anything he's attempted before.

But then there's the other side of the coin: he has intellectual equals, and access to the industrial capabilities of a major city, and little else to spend his time on.

"I... have help, Leo. We can do this."

"This place is a lot bigger than New York," Leo points out, not unkindly - if this really is possible, he'd be more than thrilled to go through with it, but his brother has a habit of running away with ideas before looking at every angle. He just wants to make sure they're not planning a suicide mission. "Not to mention insulated. Every big player in the city has their eye on the Network. Donatello - are you sure this won't attract attention?"

Edited (small correction) 2014-05-28 03:15 (UTC)

Isn't that the million-dollar question?

Don studies the board, trying to see if there's any way out of this check. "No one has ever spotted me while I was installing repeaters," he says. "And the best hackers on our Internet can't find my IP address. But, Leo, you're the strategist. How do I build this thing so uninvited guests never even know there's something to hack?"

Leo shifts his weight to one knee, leaning forward on his elbow and covering his beak in a thoughtful stance. He may be a strategist, but it's hard for him to say what exactly can or can't be done when he isn't even sure what needs to be done for it to work.

May as well start with the very basics.

"We'll need to cut down on repeaters to as few as we can get away with. If possible, we might want to hide some outside the city walls - I don't think the Emperor or any of our guests will go looking there." His gaze shoots to the board, and he holds it there for a few moments, as though playing out his own game of mental chess. "We're looking for utility; not style. Start with the bare minimum and you can start upgrading from there. As for the communicators... they should be small, discreet. Something mass-producible and destructible might be best."

This is strange for Don too; he's not used to talking to Leo this way. His M.O. tends more towards inventing things that seem useful, then unveiling them at opportune moments.

"With fewer repeaters, the new system won't be any better than the old, from a clarity-of-signal perspective." He's vaguely aware that this is missing the point, but it's important to him anyway. "We can make them smaller, though. They can be inside people's apartments." A pause, a glance in a random direction. "Maybe. I'll have to look at the frequency range again."

He's not loving the idea of disposable tech, either. It physically pains him whenever something he labored over is destroyed. Unless, of course, he designed it to explode.

"Can they be self-destructible?" he asks. "And can I call them Turtle Telecomms?"

"Some static is fine, as long as it's intelligible," he says a bit dismissively. Utilitarian leanings: a side effect of being the furthest thing from tech savvy as is possible. "I know you don't like wasting resources, but if we need to -"

He cuts himself off once he processes Don's request, and stops to give him a mild look of Really? over the board. Should he be worried about all these things you try rigging to explode?

That didn't quite sound like the end of a sentence, so Don looks expectantly at Leo, waiting for him to continue.

It takes him a minute to realize he is on the receiving end of a funny look, and then he just blinks, unsure what he's done to deserve this.

It soon becomes clear that Don has no idea why Leo finds the thought of exploding communicators disturbing. He almost rolls his eyes, but instead the corner of his mouth twitches fondly upward right before he plows on.

"Maybe we should come up with a name that's a little more... inclusive," he suggests. Not that he doesn't like the idea of the Foreigner population running around with Turtle brand name radios, but... okay, no, he just doesn't like that idea at all.

There is also no mention of the self-destruction request, which is probably as good as a green light.

Oh. Okay. After a hard moment's thought, Don looks up with a hopeful smile.

"We could call the network Shell Atlantic. Or Shell Keeliai, I guess."

Hmm... better. Any turtle-related name could easily be interpreted as in reference to Tu Vishan, after all - and hell, that's probably what everyone's mind would go to first, anyway. Maybe Leo's just being too paranoid.

Either way, the name of the project isn't really the highest thing on his list of priorities, so he attempts to shelve it for now.

"We'll talk about it later. Who else do you have working on this?"

He'll take that as another yes. Two for two.

"Aya. Mike. Other people I haven't really met yet. But - it's more like they have me working on it." He rubs the back of his neck, betraying some of the anxiety he feels about this: being welcomed into a group, and yet still being an outsider. "They all know each other. I'm the new guy."

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