Hey, Eggroll here, I'm trying something a little different then what your used to so feed back is welcomed
I don't own Power Rangers.
Eugene Skullovitch took a long drag of his cigarette as he waited off by the bar for a customer to que his readiness to tear their eyes off the woman prancing on stage and order some of the establishment's questionable food. No one had complained of food poisoning yet, so he had to conclude that it was somewhat edible, but he'd never eat the slop they serve.
The bar was dimly lit like most places of its nature. A stage strung with neon lights baked the lost girls who found there way onto that horrid stage. Offering their body for a stranger's voyeuristic pleasures. At the moment, it was Candy's performance. She spun around on the pole to Candy Girl in a sickening display of unoriginality, and held on doing the splits mid air to hint at her bedroom prowess.
A man who looked anywhere from an old-looking thirty-something to a young looking hundred-something, made a gesture to Candy up on stage to come give him a lap dance.
His name was Morty, he came everyday during Candy's performance, and paid generously for a lap dance. Eugene crossed his arms over his chest and watched for the cue that would signal for someone, him, to rescue her.
Candy was young and stupid. Honestly thought stripping was the best job out there. A high school dropout with three kids. Her dark black hair was teased out in a popular fashion with the seedier parts of society as her shiny silvery pleather bikini chaffed her already raw skin and left unsightly marks on the inside of her hips and around her enhanced chest.
The man got too closer to her personal not-so secret, and Eugene shifted forward and made his way over to the older man.
"Hey buddy, give the girl some privacy." Morty jerked back and Candy shot him a small smile. The dark haired waiter nodded to the performer and retreated back to his shadows to chase his spent cigarette with a new one.
"That guys getting to be trouble; he's starting to not be able to keep his hands in his pants." Rick, the bartender and owner of Rick's Strip Bar (very original name, Eugene had many times thought, his sarcasm wearing on him like a chain mail, protecting the once naive punk boy who followed the aptly named Bulk around like a disciple, from the rampant stagnant type of corruption that working in a strip joint gave)
"How's that different from the rest of the inbred jack offs in this god forsaken town?" Rick laughed; boy had the kid changed since he first came to the back woods town five years ago.
"In the city, a guy gets feely you can throw his ass out and not worry, because there are a hundred others to take his place, in a small town you start throwing people out and your business dries up from a lack of customers."
"Your point?" Eugene puffed a cloud of smoke down over the banister of the bar and grabbed a bottle of beer to help past the time.
"I can tell when a customer's about to go bad in this business, I wish to god I didn't have first hand experience in those types but I do. First he starts getting friendly, a little to close for comfort. Then he gets the idea in his head the girl loves him, when she's just doing her job. sht goes south from there." The younger man looked at Morty as Candy crawled on the stage to him, giving him her full attention, being as he was the only customer in the front row. He wasn't the most intelligent guy, but he was smart enough to know a catch twenty-two.
Toss Marty out and loose further business the place couldn't afford to loose, let him stay and lose the girl. Not that in this town there was a shortage of women willing to work for such a place, but it was bad business practice to allow a customer to turn like that.
"Notify the fuckin police then." Light was washed over the darkened bar as the door opened to reveal Mary Sheps. That drew the attention of the inhabitants for a brief moment before things continues as usual.
"She's just a stripper." Rick said as he went to poor the new arrival a drink.
"Back for work darlin?" He said to his infamous on again off again employee.
"Yes, where's Skull?"
"Same place as usual." Rick flicked his rag towards the scowling man. Mary rolled her eyes and sauntered over to him, taking the drink with her.
"Hey Skull, I need the keys to your place. I've got a load of luggage I'm not leaving outside for someone to steal." Eugene sneered, he wasn't Skull anymore, Skull left for outer-space with Bulk. Skull stayed behind in that doomed club with Bulk. Skull was just as dead too.
The man dug his keys out and slapped them in her palm.
Mary Sheps had graduated from Angel Grove High with him. But hey were from different casts of high school hierarchy. Eugene, known as Skull back then, was a bumbling punk who squandered his brain cells back then with loud rock music and cheep beer stolen from his dad's fridge in the garage. No plans for the future, not a care in the world except the usual things a citizen of Angel Grove had to worry about.
And of course his deeply repressed feelings for Kimberly Hart.
No one knew about his feelings, it was the one thing he didn't even feel he could trust Bulk to let in on.
Mary Sheps, on the other hand, had been a cheerleader, varsity all four years, Mommy and Daddy took care of everything, she was on top of the fucking world.
Then her Senor year her jock-boyfriend knocked her up and everything fell to pieces. She graduated by the skin if her teeth, and was cut off from her parent's wealth. Somewhere long the line she fell into a routine of working as a whore and living off her drug-lord boyfriends. Along the way, somewhere, she lost her kid and couldn't remember where.
It was a stroke of luck, whether bad or good depended; they ran into each other in this very establishment.
So a new cycle began of her living with her drug-lord boyfriends, then leaving them for whatever reason, and coming to live with him and work in Rick's.
They hated each other; they were a constant reminder of how much they've fallen, how much their life sucks. But they were familiar, a face from home so far away from all they ever knew.
Kim Hart raised her eyes to the sky and asked what she ever did to deserve this. Here she stood in the doorway of a shitty little establishment called Ricky's Strip Bar, a wanted ad in the local rag clenched in her hand. Slowly she walked into the joint and inhaled the smoke and destitution these places bred into the air.
She slid up to the bar, her worn converse padding softly on the floor, as her brightly colored socks poked through the various holes the shoes bore. She clenched her used brown duster to her as she raised her voice to capture the attention of the bar keep.
"Excuse me! I'm here for the job in the paper."
"Sorry sweetheart, the position's just been filled." The man said, not even looking up from his task of cleaning a beer mug. Kim tried not to let her face show the disappointment too much, she didn't want the job, but she needed cash and now.
She crossed her arms over her stomach pitifully and slowly turned with a desolate "okay." Rick looked up at her.
"Hang on girly, come back here." She slowly turned back and looked at him with large doe eyes. He gently grasped her chin and turned her head. Her eyes were rimmed from lack of sleep and her hair was a mess.
"Open up the coat and let me see what you got." Kim pulled the coat open to reveal her painfully thin form beneath a rumpled grey shirt that should have been form fitting and a pair of tattered blue jeans. The man scoffed.
"Almost too thin to be of any use." He sneered. "When's the last time you ate girl." She mumbled her response.
"Ah whatever, I got no use for a half starved stripper, but, I could use a part time waitress on the busy nights, my boy's good, but he ain't super man." Kim sighed in relief; she got a job and didn't have to demean herself.
"Do-do you have anything I could do for more cash?" Rick rubbed his chin thoughtfully as he held onto the mug he was cleaning by the handle.
"Not till you got more meat on your bones, girly." Kim swallowed and nodded. "Anyways, come in tomorrow, it's my other employee's night off, and I sure as hell can't afford to take any more of my girls off the poles to wait on men. You'll get your trial run then." Kim nodded and thanked the man before running off.
Eugene only caught the retreating figure in the bright outside light when he went back to the bar from his rounds.
"Who was that?"
"Some little waif of a girl came in here looking for a job. Gave her a waitressing position until she can bulk up."
Outside Kim was almost jumping for joy as she climbed in her old beat-up car and curled up in the back seat for a nap. Finally her situation was about to change.
A year after she had sighed up with her gym to become a world class gymnast, he broke her ankle and developed ligamentus laxit in the joint, which ruined her dreams and almost left her crippled, if not for a very expensive surgery she couldn't afford to pay off.
For a while she tried coaching, but that soon went to hell when a girl complained to her mom that Kim was too hard as a coach, and came home crying because of her criticism. The gym, rather than take Kim's side, appeased the parent and fired her. No other gym would take her on, so she began searching for work in other places, but the only thing that changed was the amount of debt she became buried under.
Soon she lost her house, and all of her belongings, save for a few sets of clothes and her car. Finally her credit became forever ruined because she was forced claim bankruptcy.
Circumstance led her away from the east coast and soon she found herself in a small town in the mid west. She had gotten a job as a stripper, but soon found herself on the move again, by more misfortune.
Bad luck seemed to chase her from town to town, until finally she kept running, till she had no choice but to stop and try to earn some cash. And here she found herself in this back-woodsy logger-town stuck in the nineties.
She snorted at the poetry, but literally there was a break in the storm she had been driving in, and the "Welcome" sign to the town was lit up. Taking that as much a sign as anything she was entitled to get from the heavens above, Kim pulled over and immediately snagged a newspaper for a local job.
The next day was a disgustingly sunny day and Kim had a job by the end of that day.
She wadded up an abused bundle of clothes and pulled her coat over her and slept through the hunger.