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It was in the middle of the night when the phone rang. The young man in the dark bedroom jerked out of his deep sleep , looking around startled. Usually no one called him in the middle of the night… actually, except one or two people nobody even knew his number!
He sat up in bed and reached for the phone, yawning heartily.
"Mmmhm?" he yawned again, this time into the speaker.
"Sorry to disturb your sleep, Tin-grin!" he heard a voice that stirred something in his memory and rapidly made him wide awake.
"What the fuck..?" he gasped, just to hear the person on the other end chuckle nastily.
"Yeah, know what, Shredhead, we´ve got an idea how to settle things once and for all."
"At this time of the night you crack an idea!" Saki said, groaning. "Couldn´t you wait until tomorrow?"
"It actually is tomorrow!" the turtle on the other end mocked him.
"Yeah, so, whatever! Where the fuck did you get this number, anyway?" Saki suppressed another yawn.
"Doesn´t matter, we´ve just got it." the turtle sneered.
"So what are you going to do, prank call me to death in the middle of the motherfucking night?"
"Nah, actually we want to challenge you to a battlerap."
"You want to challenge me to a battlewhat?"
"A battlerap, Shredhead! BATTLERAP! Never heard of this?"
"Nah. Should I?"
"Ask around in your freakazoid clan, somebody outta know. Two weeks from now on, prepare your sorry ass. I´ll call you again for the exact time and place."
Saki clenched his teeth. He wasn´t the man to let a challenge unanswered.
"Anytime, anywhere, mutant freak!" he spat back, still not knowing what the hell a battlerap might be. The mutant turtle laughed again.
"You didn´t even ask, what´s the price, Tin-grin!" he mentioned.
"Well, since I still have no fucking idea what the heck you´re talking about, I don´t care for a price either. Nevertheless I don´t need a price, I´ll kick your tails up and down the streets, that´ll be enough to suit me. Fuck you and rot in pain, frog!"
With this Saki took the phone and slammed it into the wall with gusto, just to snuggle under his coverlet again, to go back to sleep.
Meanwhile under the streets of Manhattan:
"Bah, the bastard hung up!" Raphael spat angrily, turning around to face his brothers, who were looking at him curiously.
"Well, did he accept?" Leonardo asked, suppressing a hiccup. "Yeah." Raphael answered, reaching for the bottle of Tequila that stood between them to take a hearty sip. "He´s going to regret the day he hauled his sorry ass over to America, dammit!"
Michelangelo giggled happily. "I still ca… can´t imagine ol´ Shredhead rapping." he slurred. Raphael bursted out laughing. "He had no idea what´s a battlerap, though!" he filled his brothers in. "Just imagine his face when he finds out!"
Donatello looked up to Raphael, his eyes already on half-mast. "But thee… ozza quession… can we rap?" he asked tentatively.
"Hey! Don! We´re the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!! The most radical gangsta rappers in New York, dude!" Michelangelo blurted out.
"Exactly!" Raphael jeered, raising the bottle of Tequila high above his head. "Hey, no matter what, we´re better than Tin-grin, aren´t we?!?" Leonardo, usually the most serious of the four sided his brothers.
"Hey, imagine Splinter rapping with us!" Raphael mused, also giggling.
"Imagine, Splinter beating Shredder in a battlerap!!!" Donatello laughed.
"Should be the utmost humiliating thing that could happen to this jerk!" Raphael grinned. "Hey, we must persuade Splinter to do it!"
The next morning, when Oroku Saki opened his eyes, he shook his head about the strange dream he had had this night. But when he looked around in his bedroom, he frowned. The phone really laid at the other side of the room, shattered, useless.
He closed his eyes for a second, trying to remember the short conversation he had had with this freak of nature.
Battlerap… two weeks… challenge..?
Shaking his head he got up, stretching extensively and yawning again.
A shower would help him to clear his head now, he thought and naked as he was, he went to his bathroom. Half an hour later he felt better, freshly showered, with brushed teeth and combed hair and a towel around his hips, he sat down at his desk, switching his computer on.
What had been this strange term – battlerap?
Stretching again he fed the term to Google and waited for a second.
But when he read the sheer number of the webpages that turned out to have something to do with "battlerap", he opened his eyes wider and switched the computer off hastily. Under no circumstances he would waste his time with clicking through this gazillion of sites.
Instead of doing research himself he decided to just delegate this to Tatsu. Quickly he dressed up. Since he allowed himself a day off duty now and then, he just put on a faded blue denim jeans and a grey tank top with a pair of Nike sneakers.
Nobody would ever supposed this nice young Asian, that looked at him from the mirror of his cupboard, to be the feared Shredder. Saki grinned with this thought and his reflection in the mirror grinned back at him, appearing completely like an innocent graduate student.
Shit, he could have walked into a police department like this and nobody would have ever even thought of him being something else then a nice, ordinary, law-abiding citizen of New York.
Even his own pupils didn´t recognize him in this outfit and more than one girl tried to capture his attention, when he walked around like this. And hey – flirting a little bit from time to time didn´t hurt at all. But today he wasn´t inclined to grab a chick, he wanted desperately to know what this "battlerap" could be. So he had to find Tatsu. Since it was early in the morning most Foot clan members were either sleeping or eating, and the entire building was rather empty. After a couple of minutes he detected Tatsu practising with some older teenagers in the dojo and waved his arms to get his attention.
"Hey there!" he shouted, trying to be louder than the music somebody had turned on and finally, Tatsu saw him. After a few words to the trainees, he stepped up to Saki, who pulled him into a quiet corner.
"I got a telephone call yesterday." he said, before Tatsu could even get a word out.
"Guess, who it was?" Tatsu shrugged. "How should I know?" he asked. "Somebody from Japan?" "Nope. Those freaks of nature, those turtles. Buddha knows, how they found out the number, but they did." Tatsu opened his eyes wider. "So what the heck did they want?" he gasped. "Challenge me. They challenged me to a battlerap, whatever this may be. Ever heard about this?"
"A battlerap? Wait, isn´t that those rapping duels or somewhat?" Tatsu asked, having a dim idea about what his master was talking.
"A… rap duel? Like dueling banjos?" Saki asked, grimacing in disgust with the whole idea. "Err… yes, kinda." Tatsu had to admit. "How on earth did those freaks get such an idea?" Saki gasped. "I´d become a laughingstock if I´d lower myself to such a lunacy! By the way, I can´t fucking rap!"
"Well if I remember correctly the idea behind this is to "diss" your opponent. Meaning you insult him as good as you can in front of an audience and the person who does it best, wins." "An audience?!?" Saki asked sourly. "Yep and the audience judges who did the best battlerap. The one who gets cheered the most, wins. It´s a strange, very american thing to do… I don´t understand it, too, but if you want me, I´ll ask around, perhaps somebody knows more about it." Saki nodded, still aghast with the proposition to do something that ridiculous as to rap.
"I don´t want to rap!" he said, rather pitiable.
"Well, it’s a challenge." Tatsu answered, trying hard to keep a straight face. "And I never heard of you retreating from a challenge."
Before Saki could even think of a suitable answer, Tatsu turned around and vanished between a bunch of cardboxes, leaving the boss of the Foot clan behind with his jaw open.
Saki shook his head, silently cursing. What on earth had he done to deserve this?
Battlerap! Him! Rapping!
What would be next, would he be condemned to wear fat gold chains and rings and dress up like a 70s pimp and make funny movements with his arms and hands?
"Must be a nightmare…" he murmured and decided to get himself a breakfast. Perhaps a bowl of cereals would help him to think about how to dodge this ridiculous challenge.
Usually he kept a rather strict diet, but in this case a lot of sugar and saturated fatty acids seemed to be the least of his problems. He went to the "dining room", a part of the building where a couple of long tables stood and poured himself a tall glass of orange juice. Sipping on it thoughtfully he turned around and tried to figure out where he would like to sit.
He wasn´t in the mood for any chit-chat and just wanted to eat something, so he decided to go to a rather short table in a corner. Putting his glass down there he went for a bowl of cereals and some strawberrys to go with it.
After a short while, another person sat down next to him, a black teeny, about 15 or 16 years old.
"Hi." he said, looking down to Saki, who toyed with his cereals, deep in thoughts.
"Hi." Saki answered, sighing deeply with misery.
"Master Tatsu said you´d wanna know about battlerap." the teeny continued, digging in his cereals.
Saki looked up in wonder. "Yeah, right." he answered, smiling shortly. "I don´t listen to rap music, you know… and now somebody challenged me to a battlerap and I have no fucking idea what to do!"
"Damn that’s a tricky one."
The lad put his spoon down and looked at Saki in concern.
"Okay, to put the whole matter in a nutshell: battlerap means: You get a certain time, from 30 to 60 seconds usually and you rap about your opponent, trying to make him look like shit. Then your opponent gets the same time, trying to make you look like shit, understood?"
"Yeah. And… how do you do this?" Saki asked, frowning.
"Err… by rapping of course. I suppose you have to hear a battlerap before you really understand what I mean."
"Okay, why not?" Saki sighed again.
//I´m fucking doomed!//
he thought, when he got up, following his "teacher" out of the dining room.
In the meantime back with the turtles:
"Oooow, my head hurts like fuck!" Raphael whimpered, sheltering his eyes agains the lamps light.
"Ditto!" Leonardo moaned, cradling his head in his hands. "Why did we have to empty all three bottles of this shit!"
Donatello just whimpered. He had been praying to the porcelain god most of the night and he still was pale and nauseatic. He even felt to weak to mention this prank call challenge on the Shredder.
Michelangelo was the luckiest of the four, snoring softly in his shell. Somehow he had the habit of retreating completely inside his shell when he slept.
"And we really did call Tin-grin?" Leonardo asked Raphael, hoping and praying that this had been just a bad dream. Raphael nodded and was rewarded with a wave of retching that made him jump to his feet and flee into the bathroom.
"Shit!" Donatello moaned. "We´re so fucked!!" With an enormous amount of willpower he stumbled to his feet, heading towards the telephone.
Raphael just came back from the bathroom and stared blearily at his brother. "Whaddaya doin´ Don?" he murmured.
"Callin´ ol´ Shredhead. Tellin´ him we´re outta this shit!"
"No can do! He´ll think we´re pussies!" Raphael protested weakly.
"I don´t give a fuck about what he thinks." Leo hissed. "I´ve got a head like a fucking skyscraper! Call it off!"
Donatello had already dialed the number.
"The person you´ve called is temporarily not available. Please try to call again later."
The techno turtle dropped the speaker.
"We´re fucking doomed!" he moaned.