Author's Note: So I was re-watching clips from Once a Ranger, because I have nothing better to do with my life, when it crossed my mind that Tori was wearing her student uniform, not her sensei one that she was wearing in Thunder Storm...

The Garbage Can's Fault

"Her surfboard. We have to take her surfboard."

"No, dude, that won't work; 'cause she keeps it by her twenty-four-seven. Haven't you ever noticed?"

"True, true...not to mention that she'll find out in about two seconds. We have to take something that's important to her, but she doesn't realize that it is."

Dustin stared at Shane in disbelief, who shrugged. "You know, just a thought."

"Okay, dude, how is that possible?" Dustin asked, frowning. "How can something be important to her, but she doesn't know it? It's, like, a total paradox."

Shane adamantly shook his head. "No, it isn't. You see, if we took Tori's pen, she wouldn't be able to take any notes. If she can't take notes, she flunks out of college. If she flunks out of college, she doesn't have a job. If she doesn't have a job, she doesn't have any money. If she doesn't have any money, she can't get a home. If she doesn't have a home, she has to live outside. If she has to live outside, sooner or later, winter rolls by and, uh-oh, hypothermia sets in. If hypothermia sets in, she dies." Shane grinned. "It's foolproof!"

"Dude!" Dustin exclaimed in alarm. "We're pulling a practical joke on her; we're not trying to kill her!" He paused for a moment. "And you know that Tori doesn't use pens. She doesn't like pens. She uses pencils because they have an eraser." He grabbed a pencil off of the table, wagging it in front of Shane's mildly disinterested face to prove his point.

"We could take her clothes," the air ninja suggested.

"No, man, that's just..." Dustin shook his head. "That's just weird. Let's put it that way and..." He faltered, an odd look on his face.

"Dustin?" Shane waved his hand in front of the earth ninja. "Hey, Dustin...man..."

Dustin plucked at his uniform, looked thoughtful for another moment, and then considerably brightened. "Yeah, let's steal her clothes!"

"What?"

"No!" Dustin grinned. "Dude! Our sensei uniforms! If we took her sensei uniform away, she'll have to wear her student uniform to class, because you know how strict Cam is about wearing the uniforms. And she'll have to wear the beginner's uniform at that, 'cause we never got the other ones!" He began laughing. "Oh, man..."

Shane smirked. "I can totally see that...her in a beginner ninja's outfit teaching a bunch of seniors. Now that would be funny."

"And," Dustin continued, now on a roll, "we have to make sure that she doesn't look like herself. Dye her hair pink!"

Shane's grin slipped a few notches. "I think that that's taking it a bit too far..."

"...And we have to put makeup on her ourselves..." Dustin continued, clearly not listening to a word Shane was saying.

"But we don't know how to put on makeup."

Dustin looked at Shane as if he was a bit crazy, and the air ninja sheepishly grinned. "Oh. That's the point, isn't it? But how are we going to get the uniform?"

Dustin wickedly grinned, something that was so uncharacteristic of him that Shane resisted the urge to lean forwards and feel the earth ninja's forehead to check for a fever.

"We get Blake, Hunter, and Cam to help out."

Shane jumped as the sound of crashing feet came through Ninja Ops' entrance, and Tori burst into the room, red in the face and her hair a mess.

"Dustin!" she panted, rushing around like a madwoman while frantically pushing aside tables and chairs. She ducked under Cam's computer desk. "Oh my god, I have to go; can you cover my classes for, like, a week?"

Dustin exchanged a fleeting glance with Shane as Tori stumbled into the back room. Boxes went flying.

"Uh, sure...? Tori? Why are you...?"

Tori came out of the room, clutching a large cardboard box. She began sifting through it, throwing random things out—a blue teddy bear, a few physics textbooks, a pocket watch, a blanket—and Shane and Dustin watched in alarm as the mountain of useless rubble grew higher around her, until Tori triumphantly leaped up with her Wind Morpher clutched in her hand. "Thanks! Gotta go! See you in a week!" She ran up the stairs, and a few seconds later, there was a loud thump and a panic-stricken yell.

"Tori! You know that the Morpher doesn't work!" Cam's voice bellowed.

"Yeah, it does!" Tori proclaimed. "The gold knight said so!"

"Gold knight? What the—?"

"I have got to get back home and change; Kira's waiting there and I can't be late!" Tori yelled happily back.

Cam turned to Shane and Dustin as her ecstatic yell faded away into the distance. "Can someone tell me what she had for dinner last night?" he incredulously asked.

Dustin shrugged, running a hand though his curly brown locks. "No clue." He turned to Shane. "Man, do you know Kira's phone number?"

Cam looked between the two former Rangers as Shane pulled out his phone and began sifting through the contacts list. "Do I want to know what you're doing?" the former Green Samurai Ranger asked hesitantly.

"We're pulling a joke on Tori," Dustin promptly replied, typing in digits rapidly into his cell phone while occasionally peeking glances at Shane's. "Okay, shh..."

Cam rolled his eyes and crossed over to the mess that Tori had made while Dustin manically grinned.

"Hello?" Kira asked through the phone, sounding confused. "Who is—?"

"KIRA!" Dustin shouted, and Shane winced, as the earth ninja had probably just completely destroyed the poor girl's eardrums, "WHERE—ARE—YOU?"

"Um..."

"IT'S—DUSTIN!"

"Oh. Dustin." Kira's voice was weak. "Um, I'm over at Tori's—"

"Okay!" Dustin breathed, dropping his voice considerably. "Kira, do you know where Tori keeps her uniform?"

There was a rustle. "Um, actually, I'm standing right by it at the moment. It's black and blue, right? Why?"

"Kira, I need you to do me a really big favor," Dustin said excitedly into the phone while Shane facepalmed. "Can you take Tori's uniform and…I dunno, hide it somewhere she won't find it?"

"Excuse me?"

"Take the uniform and hide it!"

"And hide it..." Kira sounded completely unconvinced yet helpless against Dustin's enthusiasm and verve. "Where? And, do tell, exactly why do you want me to hide it?"

"Have you taken a look at the date lately?" Dustin asked.

"March—no, April—wait, it's April first?" Kira sounded worried all of a sudden and added, seemingly to herself, "Does that mean that the glowing knight was pulling a practical joke on me?"

"Glowing knights don't do practical jokes!" Dustin impatiently said. "Kira, pretty please, just..."

"Okay, okay!" Kira yelped. "I give! I give!" There was a crackle, and the sound of a crinkling plastic bag. "I put it in the garbage can. Which is empty. Happy?"

Cam turned around, his eyes wide. "What did she just say? Because those uniforms can't be reproduced easily."

Shane's eyes widened as he lunged for the phone. "Kira—!"

Dustin danced out of the way. "Dude," he shouted at Shane, "if the garbage can is empty, and if Tori really is leaving for a week, it'll be totally fine!" To Kira, he added,

"Ignore them. They don't get it."

"I don't get it either...oh, it sounds like Tori's back, anyways...talk to you later?"

"No! Stay!"

There was an exasperated sigh from the other end as the sound of a door being opened wafted out of the tiny phone.

"She's going to her room, I think," Kira muttered into the phone. "I feel like I'm committing a crime. Why am I doing this? Okay, she just came out with, like, this other black uniform with a large blue strip down the center. But she doesn't look exactly worried..."

"You're doing it in the name of prank-iness," Dustin brightly said, "think about it that way!"

There was a faint sound in the background noise, and Kira sounded nervous by this point. "Dustin, if Tori didn't even look inside the garbage can and took it out to the curb, what should I do?"

Cam dropped the blue teddy bear he was holding. "Abort!" he shouted, leaping to his feet. He snatched Dustin's phone away from the earth ninja, eliciting a pout from the owner of the cell phone.

"Kira? Kira? This is Cam. Can you hear me? Don't let Tori take out the so-called trash, or she's going to have to come to the Academy in her student uniform for the rest of her tenure as a teacher this semester."

"Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?"

Shane grabbed the phone from Cam.

"KIRA!" he roared into the phone. "JUST STOP HER!"

"Who am I; Hermes?" Shane, Cam, and Dustin could hear Kira yelp. They could hear her yell, "Tori! Stop!"

Tori asked faintly, "Stop what?"

Shane could practically hear Kira blanch as the loud rumble of a garbage truck arrived and then faded.

There was a beep at the other end of the line, and Shane let the phone drop onto the ground. "We are so dead."

Five days later...

"Hey, Shane!" someone called to the air ninja from across the central green.

Shane looked up to see Tori heading towards him, and he felt his heart drop into his stomach. Holy shit.

"Um, hi, Tori," he squeaked, noticing that his voice had become uncharacteristically high. "Wow, you look great."

Tori looked mad as she pulled at her student uniform. "I already got mistaken four times today for being a newbie!" she seethed. "Four times! And it was not fun to be doused with water or blown across the lake with a blast of air! Do you know what the hell happened to my sensei uniform, because I heard Kira talking to you the day I left!"

"Um..." Shane frowned. "Oh, hey, look, there's Dustin. Why don't you ask him?"

"Dustin!" Tori shouted, going after the earth ninja, and Shane wilted in relief.

"Oh...oh, hey, Tor!" Dustin brightly grinned, obviously having already forgotten about the sensei-uniform-in-the-garbage-can fiasco. "You're back!"

"Dustin, do you know what the hell happened to my sensei uniform?"

Dustin opened and closed his mouth like a fish. "Um..."

Tori grabbed his shoulders and shook him. "Dustin!"

"Um," the earth sensei weakly said again, "I dunno. Why don't you ask Kira?"

"She isn't here!" Tori looked ready to rip him apart into pieces. "What happened?"

Dustin mumbled something about what sounded like "Oompa Loompa".

"What?" Tori demanded, shaking him again.

"I think that it's in a landfill somewhere," Dustin whispered as he pulled away from Tori's grasp and backed away slowly.

Tori's jaw dropped open, and Dustin chose that moment to turn around and run for it. When the water ninja recovered, she blurted something out in French (which, as far as Shane knew, was the mandated foreign language she had taken while they were still in high school, and to which was the language she used when she was seriously pissed off)—"Tu es une tête d'œuf gigantesque, crétin!"—and tore after him.

Cam wandered over, watching the furious water ninja chase her earth contemporary around.

Shane turned to him. "What did she just say? 'Tu es une tête d'œuf gigantesque, crétin!'? How does she still remember this language in the first place?"

"I think it means, 'You are a humongous egghead, you moron!'" Cam dryly replied. "Who could forget that? Although, why she would choose to say 'humongous egghead', I have no clue."

There was a strangled yell as Shane watched, throughly entertained as they both crashed into the lake.

"That would have been me, had I not directed her to Dustin," he told Cam, who looked at him in disapproval.

Cam ruefully shook his head. "Just wait until Dustin manages to tell her that he didn't actually put the uniform into the garbage, and that Kira did. I don't want to be there when that happens."

Shane wryly smiled. "Tori's a bitch when she's mad, and we're all bastards when we're evil. It's how life goes."

They watched, amused as Tori yelled at Dustin in front of the whole academy for another five minutes, until Dustin seemed to get a word in, because a few seconds later, Tori angrily shoved past a few giggling students and plunged into the forest.

"She's on a warpath," Shane observed as the scream resonated through the trees, scaring the birds on the branches.

"KIRA FUCKING FORD, YOU ARE SO DEAD!"

Kira did not expect to find or receive anything out of the normal while prepping for her concert at Cyberspace.

She could hear the excited chatter of the crowd outside as she checked her guitar's tuning nervously once more, glancing fleetingly at the clock.

Five minutes out...

As Kira sat around the room, looking for something to entertain herself with, there was suddenly a commotion outside—people yelling, some scuffling sounds—and someone hammered on the door, yelling:

"KIRA FREAKING FORD!"

Kira jumped up, startled as she heard Conner's voice wafting through the cracks in the door.

"What's going on?"

Kira cautiously poked her head out of the door, coming face to face with one spitting mad ninja who was red in the face and dripping wet.

She smiled anyways. "Tori! Hi! I thought that you were teaching—"

Tori interrupted. "DID YOU THROW MY SENSEI UNIFORM AWAY?!" she demanded.

Kira's eyes widened. "Um...that wasn't my fault."

"Excuse me? What the hell? You were talking to Dustin on the phone the day we left!"

"Yeah, but first," Kira rattled off, "I wasn't the one who willingly did it. Dustin made me. And I wasn't the one who threw it out; you were the one who took it to the curb. So, technically, Tori"—she smiled sympathetically at the expression on Tori's face—"you were the one who threw it out."

Tori blinked, mumbled something to herself, and sighed. "I guess you're right. It was the garbage can's fault."

Kira wilted in relief as Tori exited, and then patted her guitar case, which had a neatly folded black-and-blue uniform lain across the top.

"I knew that she would never find it."