Tang Shen (Long Story Short)

* Scumbug
* Tang Shen

**Tang Shen**, later known as Scumbug, is a human-born mutant cockroach and one of the "sisters" of Baxter Fly's gang.

## Physical Appearance

### As human

Tang Shen was a Chinese and Japanese woman with long straight dark brown hair, brown eyes, light skin, and a thin figure. She wore a white button up shirt with rolled up sleeves, black cuffed skinny jeans, a brown woven belt with gold hardware, and dark red sneakers with white laces and soles.

### As mutant

Scumbug is a purple cockroach/human hybrid with a stocky build. Parts of her body still have human skin and her right arm is still mostly human, unlike most other mutants. Her mandibles are powerful enough to chew through metal, as she demonstrated in the sewers.

## History

Shen was originally from the city of Fukuoka. At some point, she met Splinter and Shredder. Both men fell in love with her, but her love belonged to the latter so much so that she moved from her native Fukuoka to Tōkyō to be near him.

Eventually, Splinter and Shen had married and were blessed with four sons (Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo), and a baby girl, Miwa. Shredder had trouble accepting her choice and felt that Splinter "stole" her. Her and Splinter's marriage was strained after Miwa's birth due to him spending more time focus on the Foot Clan than her and Miwa. Shen felt ninja had no place left in the world and wanted a better life for her and her family. Not wanting her daughter to follow the path of the Foot Clan, she tried to convince Splinter to leave Japan and move to New York City.

After Shredder came to fight Splinter for Shen, Shen escaped. Shredder started the house on fire and killed Splinter's four sons, kidnapping Miwa and renaming her Karai. As she aged, he would tell her that Yoshi had murdered Shen, raising her to unknowingly hate her own father.

Thinking that Shen was dead, Splinter lived in the sewers and found four baby turtles which he named after his sons.

Around the same time Splinter was living in the sewers, Shen had found a job as an exterminator for bugs at the Techno-Cosmic Research Institute, when Shredder (working for TCRI), found out that she was Tang Shen, and got Baxter Fly to mutate her into Scumbug and make her join Baxter Fly's gang.

When Baxter Fly's gang met up with the Ninja Turtles, he told them that she only spoke "vermin" when introducing her. Scumbug assisted her siblings in robbery and attacking the (perceived) turncoat Turtles until the latter made a plea for the gang to abandon their plot against humanity. Scumbug, along with her siblings, realized that they never wanted to really eradicate humans to begin with, they just felt they had no other choice. They turned on Baxter Fly and smashed him into his ooze humidifier, with Rocksteady and Bebop giving the final push to knock it - and him - out of their hideout and into the water.

Later, the siblings all moved in with the Turtles and Splinter into the sewers. Scumbug and Splinter began a relationship, much to his sons' disgust.

## Trivia

* This is the first version of TMNT where Tang Shen is kept alive.
* This is the second version of TMNT were Scumbug ends up with Splinter, the first being Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.