Happy 30th Anniversary to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Movie (1990)

SYNOPSIS: In this classic sequel to the original 1990 TMNT film, the Turtles and Master Splinter are settled into their new life with human friends and enemies. But a nostalgic visit to their childhood lair, abandoned after it was wrecked by the Foot Clan, exacts a terrible cost - and the Turtles must take the greatest risk of their lives in order to survive.

Introduction: True Forces is a novel written by Sue Sitler in 1990 & '91 as a sequel to the original live-action TMNT film. The story, written on a Commodore 64 and printed on dot-matrix, became a legend among the pre-Internet circles of pen pal fandom, who passed it around via mail and the rare in-person meetup. A team of fans worked in the late '90s to OCR scan and then proofread those pages, which could then be uploaded for new audiences online. The webpage hosting it went dark around 2009, but fans did not forget - and after some excellent sleuthing by the folks at the Stealthy Stories TMNT forum and a wondering approval from Sue herself, it's been brought back to the world again. Enjoy it in all its early '90s glory! And if you like the distinctive writing style, check out the sci fi / fantasy of C.J. Cherryh, a huge influence on Sue's amazing voice. ~ Ria-angelo

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Updated FOREWORD & Aknowledgements (2018)

To the Reader:

First off, many thanks go to Ria-angelo for both previously and currently hosting True Forces for me, both in the early 2000's (Geocities) and currently here on Fan Fiction! As her life is now becoming as busy as mine used to be, I'm going to resume responsibility for the tale and post it here under my own User name - MEGA THANKS to Ria for getting the tale up until I could get myself organized enough to do that! She is every bit the Angel that her User name proclaims and she has my deepest and most heartfelt thanks for all of the online assistance, and more importantly, for being the best possible friend ever! (Please visit her posted stories - they're Awesome!)

Sue Sitler

November 2018

and PS - just because it's still valid, here's the Foreword that went out with the original dot-matrix hard copy, back in the day...

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Original FOREWORD (1991)

To the Reader:

They say that forewarned is forearmed, and I have to admit that when I first went movie-going with my children to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Movie I suppose I wasn't-the kids had a good time, but I walked away captivated, mesmerized, and just starving for more of the same. I had been a purely recreational writer for about twenty years and all of my creative attentions suddenly descended in to the sewers of New York, and they haven't come out since...

The vast majority of the story that had come to me had done so in the very first week or so of having viewed the film, and subsequent trips to the theatre were done as much for research purposes as for sheer entertainment value. I was looking for details and any that I had missed I was able to pick up as soon as the video was released (my attention STILL hadn't wavered, much to my husband's bewilderment) and I continued hacking away at my keyboard, trying to get the tale down on paper. It had simply continued to grow on me and I was having some trouble keeping up...as any of my writing was and always had been done pretty much for my own amusement, it always seemed to fall down to the bottom of my list of things to do...family and home and full-time employment slowed the transcription process to the point that the second movie came out before my own sequel was quite finished! The film sequel dealt largely with the mysterious ooze (as we all know by now - ) and so did mine, which left me somewhat disheartened because to reconcile my storyline with what had now become common public knowledge would mean a total re-write or utter abandonment, and I'd felt like I'd come too far for either...eventually I found a way to side-step the second movie altogether (I hope it's a satisfactory one!) and decided to just keep to my own plot, which I still (self-bias notwithstanding) liked better than the film sequel.

And so, a word of warning...this whole story was and is based entirely on the characters and situations presented in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Movie. Every effort was made not to contradict anything that those characters said or did, and only to expand on some aspects with an eye to plausibility and detail...from the beginning I wanted this thing to be REAL-or as real as I could manage to make it! The Turtles are such a wonderfully absurd concept, I seem motivated by a deeply-rooted desire to believe in them! Whether anything ever becomes of the story presented here, I can only hope that those reading it will have some small fraction of the fun that I had in writing it!

S. Sitler

October 1991