Author's Note: a semi-sequel to Sceptres and Strategies, and my own response to the perpetual question: "What if there was a fifth turtle...?"

Renaissance

In the beginning…

"Just what do you think you're doing, young lady?" Lord Simultaneous' voice boomed across his private library.

Renet jumped and spun around. "N-nothing, Master! Honest!" She gave him a faltering smile.

The Lord of Time eyed his leggy apprentice suspiciously. She was clad in her night clothes, and he wasn't sure that the knee-length shirt and fuzzy slippers were an improvement on the ridiculous cloak and hat that he normally made her wear during the day. "It's the middle of the night. You should either be asleep, or out partying with your friends while you tell them how I'm an evil ogre who makes you dust antiques for eons. 'Cause the Everlasting knows, there's no way you'd be doing something as prosaic as studying at this hour." He squinted at the table behind the girl, and barked, "What are you hiding there?"

"Nothing – nothing important," she squeaked. She moved her hands, trying to make herself wide enough to cover up her late-night project.

There wasn't enough of her to cover it, though. "That's the Bowl of Infinite Options. I expressly told you not to touch that, even to dust it! What are you doing, foolish girl?"

"I-I…see, master, a demon told me to…"

He held up one hand. "Stop! No matter what else you might do, vixen, while you are my apprentice you will not lie to me! Understand?"

"I…yes, Master," she scuffed the floor with one slippered foot and sighed. "See, it's like this. After my test the other time, when the Turtles were at that monastery and all those people were sick and fighting and stuff? Like, Leo is sooo ticked off at me. You saw him, right? He's, like, never going to let me near them ever again! But they're my friends, and they're still at the early part of their lives, and I want to be able to…well, like, I thought if I made life better for them from the beginning, maybe Leo wouldn't be mad at me anymore, and we'd be friends. Yes?" She blinked at him hopefully.

Lord Simultaneous looked back at her, lips pressing together. There was a lot to learn, if one wanted to become a true Lord of Time, and Renet already had a lot of work on her plate. If he understood what she was doing, then this wasn't a lesson he'd planned to teach her anytime soon – at least, not until she'd learned the basics of Temporal Pattern Reading! But if she was going down this path, he was determined to make it memorable for her. "Go on," he said neutrally.

"Okay, so," Renet fumbled for words. Then she fumbled for the Bowl instead. She held it up between herself and her master, apparently unaware of the way the stone carvings around the edge of the Bowl writhed and strained to get closer to her fingers. "I thought, Leo's whole 'thing' in his life is how he's, like, totally devoted to his family, right? So if I could make that family a little bit bigger, maybe by giving him back one of his brothers that he lost…?"

"Oh, no you don't, young lady!" he snapped, reaching for the Bowl. "I've told you so many times, it should be able to get into even your empty head: you do NOT bring back the dead – "

"No, of course not!" she snapped back, pulling the Bowl back over one shoulder and glaring at him. "I'm not, like, totally stupid! I know I can't undo what happens at the end for them, though I really wish you'd let me do something about Mikey's, um…anyway, that wasn't my plan."

He tilted his head at her, hands falling back to his sides. This wasn't exactly what he'd expected. Maybe it was a completely different lesson that he'd have to teach tonight. "Okay, so spill it already! Or I'll just ground you for another year."

Renet took a deep breath, and looked into the Bowl. Lights flickered out of the seemingly-empty surface, splashing colors across her face, and she smiled. Then she looked directly at her master. "I'm going to give him the brother who should have been with them all along."

"Don't," he surprised both of them with the gentle pleading in his tone. "Girl, listen to me. You don't know how much pain you will cause, instead of taking it away."

She shook her head. "What pain? There should have been five Turtles, is all. And besides, I've already started it." The lights flickered again, more brightly.

Lord Simultaneous sighed, and stepped forward to lay his hands over hers. "Fine, then," he said, feeling the stone curl up around both of their fingers, binding them to each other and to the Bowl for the duration of the magics she'd cast. "Then let me show you exactly how bad an idea this really is." He hoped that he could at least guide her – and the small family she meddled with – away from complete disaster. If everything went as badly as he feared it might, his own skills just might be enough to salvage something out of this terrible idea.

A small red-eared slider sunned himself on a flat rock in an aquarium, blissfully alone and out of the crowd of dozens of siblings on the mossy floor inches below him. Climbing the rock was quite an accomplishment, and few members of his clutch were big enough to do it yet. Most of them still crawled in and out of the shallow pool of water, contenting themselves with the weaker sunlight that filtered down to the artificial shore next to their tiny "pond." He would be proud of himself, if he had the ability to feel pride.

He did feel a certain contentment, though, as the heat seeped into his shell. So far, he had many good things to enjoy, like clean water, plentiful food, and sunny heat to lay in when he wanted it. He regarded the movement on the other side of the flat glass with a complete lack of concern – in his scant few weeks of life, nothing that happened outside the aquarium had ever touched his idyllic life inside it, or so he believed.

That was all about to change.

"Chet, I think that's enough turtles."

"But Mom said I could have four or five," Chet clutched the small glass bowl to his chest and smiled up at his father in a way that usually meant he'd get what he wanted. "Please?"

Before the harried father could decide, the pet shop clerk smiled – he'd been flirting with a pretty blonde girl, and it made him happy with the entire world – and reached back into the aquarium one last time. "Here ya go!"

The sunning red-eared slider withdrew into his shell in fright at finding himself airborne in the clerk's hand. The cool air outside of his little world hit him, and he uttered a tiny "Meep!" of distress. The clerk didn't hear it, though. Neither did a grinning Chet, as the fifth turtle was deposited into the glass bowl. The other four did, though, and answered with tiny distress sounds of their own. This new place was cold, and there was no water, no food, no sun! Only siblings who crowded into the slippery floor of this scary place. They scrambled over each other or tucked themselves into their shells, unhappy and wary.

Chet, though, was thrilled with his birthday gift. He held the bowl up to the light and turned it around, looking at his new pets from all angles through the glass. "What should I name them, Dad?"

"Whatever you want," his father shrugged, tucking the receipt into his pocket. "That's one of the good parts of having pets: you get to pick their names."

"There's five of them – maybe I should name them after the Power Rangers!" Chet was even more excited about this idea.

"What, Red Ranger, Green Ranger, that sort of thing?" His father was amused, his irritation at being conned into buying one more pet fading at last. He hefted up a small bag of supplies they would need to get the turtles set up in their new home and opened the pet shop door, letting Chet out into the summer sunlight. The rain that had poured steadily all morning showed no sign of coming back that afternoon, and the city smelled as fresh as it ever did. Water still drained along the curbs.

"No," Chet said, with all the scorn that an eight-year-old can muster. "I mean, Billy, and Zack, and…hey, are any of them girls?" He held the bowl up and squinted at the turtles' yellow undersides with one eye. "How can you tell?"

"Er," now that was a new worry. Chet's father made a mental note to get some books about turtles out of the library a.s.a.p., and took a breath to change the subject.

Heavy brakes squealed, far too close for comfort. Someone in front of them screamed. In pure reflex, Chet's father yanked the boy backwards by his shirt collar –

- Chet's glass bowl, containing his precious turtles, flew out of his hands with the force of his father's panicked pull. For just one second, the five baby turtles could be seen, floating in the empty air inside their bowl -

- and then the bowl smashed into something that had flown off the screaming truck, and they were gone. The broken bowl, and all five turtles, fell into the stream of water at the curb and were washed away into a nearby storm drain.

Chet burst into tears.

"Aww, it's gonna be okay, little guy!" Renet crooned at the image of the small boy in the surface of the bowl. "Didja see me there, master? I was in the shop! That guy, he gave the boy five turtles, because of me!"

"Renet," Lord Simultaneous began, totally uninterested in his apprentice's ability to flirt with people, "how, exactly, did you think this was going to play out? What were you expecting?" His voice was dangerously calm – though he suspected that his apprentice still had no idea what she'd started, even seeing it play out in front of her.

"There're five of them now!" Renet said proudly. "You saw it – the guy at the shop gave the boy a fifth turtle! Leo's gonna be so thrilled when he finds out – "

"And how will he find out?" the Lord of Time let the irritation creep back into his voice. "How, exactly, will he know that he has one more brother than he should have had? Were you planning to just march up and tell him?"

"Er…yes?" Renet shrank a little bit. "I mean…I guess so…?"

Lord Simultaneous regarded her for a long, flat moment. "You guess so?"

Renet bit her lip and looked away. The Bowl, still holding itself tightly to their fingers, wavered a little bit in the air between them. The colors flickered wildly.

"Young lady, you are in worlds of trouble. You don't understand what you've set in motion, or how much destruction you've caused with this…childish meddling!" he spat. The Bowl began to vibrate with the combined force of his anger and the demands of the spell.

"I just…I wanted them to be, to be, I dunno…happy?" Tears filled Renet's eyes. Her satisfaction vaporized completely. She wailed, "They're my friends!"

"Are they?" Simultaneous' voice was flatly dangerous. "Do you really understand what you've done to them – what you've done to everyone they know – just now?"

The tears spilled over. She couldn't blot them or wipe them away, not while her hands were bound to the Bowl of Infinite Options.

"Well," he said at last, "you've started it. Let's see exactly how bad it's going to get, for them and for everyone else."