Disclaimer: The playground isn't mine, I'm only taking a turn on the slide. This begins toward the end of "Mondo's Last Stand," then takes a hard turn. Thank you for reading.
One of his adversaries fell, grabbing frantically at the horrific hole in its body before the last of its strength vanished. A blast of magical energy dismissed another. Another met its end with just a glare, dissipating into the kaleidoscopic sky.
"We require assistance!" he heard one shout in their strange, nearly forgotten language. He did not care; he was too close now. Let their help come. Let every ally they could summon appear before him. No being, no number of beings, could stand between him and the Heart now.
He chuckled at the three now charging at him. He could not even name their species. Most likely, no being alive could. Their name was lost to time, their mission a myth, their world a fantasy.
Except he had found it. Of course he had. He had entered the Prismatic Storm, he knew where to find the Heart of Turmoil. Even now, he could feel the Heart empowering him, could see it shifting the Storm in the sky, directing its energy toward him. It knew him, and it was choosing to help him.
He had won. There was no clearer sign.
"You will desist!" the guard in the center demanded. "None can be permitted to approach the Heart!"
He stopped. "'Permitted?'" He chuckled, a sound now utterly devoid of humor, then thrust his staff forward. The two guards on either side dissolved, leaving only the speaker, all the more pathetic in his solitude. "I certainly do not recall asking for permission." The remaining annoyance was raised into the air by its head, struggling against a restraint it could not see. "And I will not start now."
He twisted his hand sharply, and the guard's upper half twisted just as quickly, with a snap that would have sickened lesser beings. The thing collapsed to the ground and did not move. Fascinating that creatures so ancient could be killed as easily as any human.
He growled involuntarily at the thought of humans, the vile creatures that had driven him to this. Without further hesitation, he left the corpses behind and continued his march toward the Heart, so near, waiting for him.
Rocky looked up as Tommy and Jason settled onto the benches. "Hey, Jason, guys, look," he began. "Um, I don't know what I was thinking, trying to take on Mondo myself." He gave the team an embarrassed grimace. "I'm really sorry about that."
"Hey, look, man," Jason replied, "you should know that I'm your friend, and that," his smile of understanding turning into a laugh of pleasure, "I'm just glad I'm on your team!"
Rocky smiled back. "I mean, hey, you know, you can't save the world without working together, right?"
"And working together," Billy added, "we accomplished something I never thought we would."
Tanya grinned. "That's right!That's right! King MondoThe Machine Empire is gone!is beaten!"
Katherine's head shot up and she stared at Tanya, confused. "What did you say? How did you...?"
Tommy and Billy exchanged looks of concern. "Kat?" Tommy asked. "Are you all right?"
"Didn't you hear that?" Kat looked around at her friends. "Tanya, how did you do that?"
"What did I do?"
"You... you said two things at the same time." Kat closed her eyes. "I think it's made me a little bit dizzy."
"Kat, stay with us," Adam said, reaching out to support her as she began to sway. "Guys?"
Jason shot Tommy a look. "I'm going to say we should continue this conversation somewhere else."
Tommy nodded. "Yeah, let's get to the Power Chamber. Quickly."
He was not generally inclined to stand in awe of anything — he much preferred when others stood in awe of him — but in his first moments alone in the presence of the Heart of Turmoil, he could do no less. Its last defenders lay dead around him, and not all by his hand; this close, with the connection this strong, the Heart had summoned its own warriors, fiends of the storm, ever-shifting, ever-deadly.
They would obey his commands once the Heart was his, with all its power; they would act in his name and for his glory. But for the moment, they ignored him, standing faceless, mindless, waiting.
The Heart seemed to be growing as he approached it, though he had the vague sense that the universe was actually shrinking around it. If he were not wholly focused on the Heart, the sensation might have unsettled him; but then, it might not have. After all, that was what he would do with the Heart: shrink the universe, compress it, collapse it, until he could hold it in his hand.
In his hand...
The Heart was in his hand, and in an instant, it was in his mind as well, engraving itself into his thoughts and annihilating any remaining doubts, replacing it all with itself. He knew what to do next, knew that once he had, all he had wanted and all he had not known he wanted would be his.
The battle had opened a hole in the roof of the chamber. Gazing up through it, staring into the Prismatic Storm surrounding the small planet, he touched the Heart to his chest.
And he screamed a scream that lasted for a moment and forever.
"Anything, Zordon?" Tommy asked from his place beside Kat, still holding her hand. The dizziness had passed, but neither of them had been inclined to let the other go.
Their mentor shook his head ponderously. "Our scans have not revealed anything out of the ordinary," he announced in his inimitable tone. Alpha nodded in agreement.
"And there's no obvious cause to start searching from," Billy added. "I've reviewed the fight with Mondo, and Kat was not subjected to anything the rest of you weren't." He turned to face the blonde. "There was also nothing abnormal overall that would have the potential to affect you this way. You don't have to be worried that Mondo did something specific to hurt you."
"Thanks, Billy," Kat said, smiling slightly. "But I'd still like to know what it was."
Billy leaned back against the console. "You said you heard Tanya say two things at once. Could you go into a bit more detail? For example, did you hear it differently from one ear than the other, or did it sound different in your head than it did aloud?"
"No, nothing like that." Kat sighed, releasing Tommy's hand, and tried to collect her thoughts. "It was like she said two things that overlapped without interfering with each other. Like two Tanyas speaking at once, but I could hear them both clearly: 'King Mondo is gone' and 'the Machine Empire is beaten.'"
Tanya frowned. "I didn't say 'the Machine Empire is beaten.' Did I?"
"We didn't hear you say it," Adam said. "Or at least I didn't."
Rocky and Jason shook their heads. Tommy smiled gently and apologetically at Kat. "I didn't hear it either," he told her.
"Wonderful. I'm losing my mind," Kat muttered.
"I doubt that," Billy replied. "Too much strange activity goes on around us for us to assume that you simply imagined this. There are other possibilities to investigate. Zordon —"
The Pink Ranger stood at the edge of the new cliff, gazing over the ruins under the dark sky. She shivered, a rare occurrence in her Ranger uniform. She knew this area, remembered the diner and church that should have been standing no more than twenty feet from her. Instead, she could see the remains of both below her, an obscene pile of metal and stone partially buried beneath the soil they had once sat upon. There was no solace to be found in the lovely trees that stood on the side of the road; they were now warped, terrible mockeries of themselves.
She heard footsteps behind her. Time to go. She wasn't ready to leave, though, despite the horror; instead, she just turned her head slightly to speak.
"This was the first vision, you know," Katherine said over her shoulder. "That day in the Power Chamber when everything started going wrong. This was what I saw."
She looked up into the blackness, momentarily preferring that to the sights ahead of and behind her. She couldn't have done that if they could still see the sun; it would have been high in the sky, early afternoon. It was kind of remarkable how quickly they'd adjusted to the awful sky and the sickly, variegated light that lit the world from everywhere and nowhere.
Of course, she'd already seen it, in a manner of speaking, by the time it came to be. For all the good it had done them, they had been warned.
Kat shivered again, then shook her head angrily. "I hate this. Bad enough that I have to see it, but those visions, this feeling of remembering having seen what I'm actually seeing for the first time now, all make me feel like I'm living my life by —"
"— someone else's clock," Kat whispered from her seat on the floor.
"She's talking!" Rocky called.
Tommy, at her side, lifted her chin to look at her as the rest of the team closed around them. "What did you say?"
Kat opened her mouth to respond, then closed it and closed her eyes tightly. "Oh, my God," she gasped. "What was that? What happened?"
Billy crouched in front of her. "We're not sure. Tommy thought you had fainted, at first, but your eyes were open. We were worried about a seizure, but everything's checked out all right medically so far. What did you say, just now?"
"It sounded like something about a clock," Adam prompted.
"Someone else's clock," Kat repeated. "'I'm living my life by someone else's clock.'"
A series of worried glances made its way around the group. "Okay..." Rocky said. "So did that send a chill down anybody else's spine, or was that just me?"
Tommy rolled his eyes. "That's not exactly helpful, Rocky, thanks. Kat, do you have any idea what that means?"
"I was... oh, it was horrible, Tommy," Kat trailed off into a whisper. "It was some kind of hallucination or vision where everything was gone. Just gone. The sky was black, the city was ruined, even the trees were twisted and wrong."
"What city?" Tanya asked. "Was this Angel Grove?"
Kat nodded. "And I was talking about today, right now, like it was in the past, and about how it had all started when I had first seen what I was seeing there."
"It's not just you, Rocky," Billy said, softly. Hoping to give Kat a moment to calm down, he turned back to Zordon. "Does this new information make this sound like anything you've heard of before?"
Before Zordon could answer, an insistent, unusual alarm began to wail, making everybody wince. Alpha, flustered, immediately hit a button to reduce the volume; simultaneously, every screen in the Power Chamber lit up a pale shade of purple. As the teens' heads turned to look, white letters in an alien language appeared, blinking on and off. The Power Chamber's automatic translation system caught up shortly afterward.
"'GALACTIC EMERGENCY — PLEASE STAND BY,'" Jason read, then sighed. "That sounds terrific. You know, maybe I'm the only one who remembers this, but a few minutes ago, we were all set to celebrate beating the Machine Empire."
"We should have known better," Rocky quipped.
Billy was studying the screen, brow furrowed. "Zordon, what is this? I've never seen an alarm like this before."
"This is an ancient, long-superseded alert system, Billy," Zordon began to explain. "In some ways, it is a treasure of astral history; it was in place long before I was born. It was one of the first communications networks put into place by the early interstellar travelers, and the first such network capable of faster-than-light transmission to multiple recipients."
"If it's that old and outdated, why is it still used?" Tanya asked.
"It is still the fastest way to communicate an urgent message to as many planets as possible. It can only transmit a warning like this one, followed by a short message of explanation some time later, but it can do so more quickly than any other wide-distribution network built since. Good-aligned civilizations have counted on it for untold millennia, continuing to build their own communications receivers in such a way that they can receive this message if it is sent."
"Somebody always has it worse. A 'galactic emergency' is going to be a bigger deal than whatever it is that's wrong with me," Kat said, putting as much optimism into her voice as she could; she had appreciated being distracted from her experience, even if only for a fraction of a second.
Tommy and, to her surprise, Billy and Jason all immediately shook their heads, but it was Zordon who spoke. "Katherine, given the timing of your incident and this emergency, as well as the apparent scale of both, we cannot assume they are not related; in fact, it is more likely than the alternative. In addition, it will take time for the explanation to arrive, and perhaps several days before we receive full details about the emergency. Anything we can learn about your incident will help you, and could assist us in preparing if we learn that this emergency will affect us."
"All right, then," Billy said. "So, Zordon, is there any record of any experiences like Kat's?"
"I am familiar with several incidents in which a person received a similar vision, described as an apparent future or an alternate timeline," Zordon said. "Such events are frequently said to seem like future memories, or to have the appearance of reality. However, few of them have a common cause, and none of the established causes apply in Katherine's case. Beyond that, we simply have very little information at this moment. Katherine, I am sorry to cause you further distress, but if you still remember it clearly, can you provide any further detail about your experience?"
"I remember," Kat whispered. "I can't forget." She closed her eyes, and tried to take comfort in Tommy's hand on her shoulder. "It was definitely Angel Grove, and what I saw of it had been utterly destroyed. There was a cliff where there shouldn't be a cliff, and, well, everything was broken or wrong or both."
"You said you were talking about having had the 'vision' while inside it. If this is indeed a vision of your future, did your future self offer any additional information about the nature of the vision?"
"I called it —" Distress broke Kat's concentration, and her eyes shot open. "Oh, no. I called it 'the first vision.'" She was silent for a few moments, simply staring at the floor, unable to see the looks of concern and sympathy among her friends. "This is going to happen again," she finally said, barely audibly.
"We don't know that for sure, Kat," Tommy said, doing his best to reassure her — and himself, it seemed. "We don't know what this is."
"If it is our future, though," Jason added quietly, "it sounds like we're in for some serious trouble that we should probably be ready for."
Alpha had been quiet for most of the discussion, but now his chirpy voice cut through the tension. "Zordon, I have the latest scan results for you now!"
After a moment, Zordon nodded. "Katherine, we have scanned you for temporal fluctuations or disturbances, and were unable to find any. That does not mean there is no truth to your visions, but you can rest assured that you, yourself, are not traveling abnormally through time."
Kat managed a half-smile. "I wasn't concerned about that in particular, but that's good, I suppose. Thank you."
"Who were you talking to?" Billy asked. "When we heard you speak at the end of the vision, were you talking to yourself, or was there somebody else there?"
"Somebody else," Kat said, then nodded with more certainty. "There was somebody behind me. Somebody I expected to be behind me, not somebody surprising me."
"Friend or foe? One of us?"
"I'd assume a friend. I didn't feel threatened. But I can't place who it was. It's like... I knew who it was in the vision, but my mind here doesn't know." Kat snorted. "Listen to me, acting like the expert already."
Billy offered a smile. "For all intents and purposes, you are, at least until we can find more information."
"And what do I do until then?" Kat asked. "Just wait to see what happens next time I don't quite faint?"
The strange alarm sounded again; while it wasn't as loud this time, the surprise of it and the tension in the room made more than one of the teens jump slightly. Again, the Power Chamber's displays lit up in purple with blinking white characters.
"HIGHEST URGENCY. PRISMATIC STORM COMPROMISED. HEART OF TURMOIL STOLEN. GRAVE DANGER." As coordinates began to appear at the end of the message, Rocky looked over to Zordon. "All right, I'll be the one to ask. What's a 'prismatic storm' and a 'heart of turmoil?'"
Zordon, amazingly, hesitated before answering, getting the entire group's attention. "Zordon?" Tommy asked.
"Until now, I would have said that the Prismatic Storm is an astrophysical anomaly, and the Heart of Turmoil is a legend," Zordon said. "However, it appears both of those assessments require updating. The story of the Heart of Turmoil was old even when I was young, and I know of few who took it seriously." He paused again to gather his thoughts.
"The Prismatic Storm is a cloud of multicolored gas or plasma that surrounds a planet whose name I have never known. It is generally held to be protecting something on the planet's surface, though that is not quite what the stories say. It has been quite a long time since any force I am aware of attempted to visit the planet; few alive would dare to find out what the Storm is actually hiding, especially given that, if the Heart of Turmoil were just a legend, it is unlikely any expedition to the planet would discover anything worth the risk of entering the Storm."
Adam nodded. "And the Heart itself?"
"The Heart of Turmoil is an object of galactic mythology, and as such, there are a remarkable amount of conflicting stories about it. If it exists, I cannot say for certain what it is or why it is desirable."
"I don't think they set off great big alarms for myths and legends," Tanya said, crossing her arms. "Let's assume it exists for now, and if old stories are the only information we have, we'll work from there."
"Certainly, Tanya. According to the story, one of the first true magicians in the universe, a man we know simply as the Kind One, focused his studies on the structure of space-time. In particular, he developed a fascination with the idea of chaos and the universe's inherent disregard for order. Using his power, power he did not know the full extent of, he was working on a magical device to use in simulations of order and disorder."
"I've heard this kind of story before," Rocky said. "Did staring into chaos drive him mad? Is 'the Kind One' an ironic nickname?"
"It is not," Zordon explained. "However, he had an apprentice, a man the story names the Vile One. The Vile One had talent as a magician, which led the Kind One to attempt to teach him to use it responsibly. But the Vile One was underhanded and ambitious. He cared only for his own wealth and power, and as the Kind One's experiments progressed, the Vile One saw an incredible opportunity to obtain the power he desired."
"He waited until the Kind One's device was nearly ready. Then, on the day the Kind One would cast the last enchantment, the Vile One murdered him, claimed the device, and cast the last spell himself. What he was left with was the Heart of Turmoil, an object that was not just disinclined toward order, but actively inclined toward disorder, with, if the stories can be believed, a small sense of self-preservation and a touch of the Vile One's ambition. It is, in a very real sense, a physical manifestation of chaos."
"But that's inherently contradictory," Billy pointed out. "Chaos is freedom; it's unbound actions. Confining a 'manifestation of chaos' to a single physical object, you'd expect a pretty intense philosophical conflict."
"Many scholars spent substantial time trying to interpret the meaning of that conflict, when it was believed to be a legend," Zordon acknowledged.
"What did they come up with?" Kat asked. "Anything not terrible?"
"I am uncertain," Zordon admitted. "I do not believe any two groups ever agreed on an interpretation."
"And a Prismatic Storm sounds pretty chaotic, in my opinion," Tommy said. "Could it be that the Storm was created by the heart, or is part of it somehow?"
"I cannot rule it out."
"So, to review, we've got a possibly intelligent and potentially self-hating chaos bomb that may or may not still have a storm around it," Jason said. "Questions now are who took it and where are they taking it?"
"Don't ask 'where,'" Rocky groaned. "We never want to know 'where.'"
"We cannot answer the first question yet," Zordon said. "I expect we shall receive additional details, but that transmission will take quite some time, particularly with the potential number of recipients."
"So that leaves the 'where.' Sorry, Rocky," Billy said with a small smile. "The coordinates in the message look like a point of origin and then a direction of departure. Alpha, could you plot those for us, please?"
"Of course, Billy." Alpha shuffled over to a different console and began punching buttons in his deliberate way. As the group gathered around a screen, Alpha dismissed the emergency message and replaced it with an overlay of the galaxy. "This is our galaxy, and this point," a small dot began to blink red, "is the location indicated by the coordinates." Alpha entered a few more numbers and a pale yellow cone appeared, spreading outward from the red point. "If something left the point moving in that direction, it could be headed anywhere in this cone."
"And Earth?" Adam asked.
Alpha pushed one more button. A light blue dot appeared, representing Earth. It appeared to be dead center in the middle of the cone.
"I told you so," Rocky muttered.
"What if we assume its path is absolutely straight?" Tommy asked. "I mean, I know it's not exactly precise, but if we replace the cone with a straight line, how close to Earth does that line pass?"
Alpha began to reprogram the display. To Kat, it looked for a moment as though Billy was going to ask him not to do so, but the former Blue Ranger just sighed and glanced away. Catching Kat's eye, he shrugged apologetically. They could both guess what they were about to see.
As Alpha finished, the cone began to contract, the edges moving inward to converge at the center until only a thin, yellow line remained, neatly bisecting Earth.
Alpha did not need to answer Tommy, but he did anyway. "At its closest point, this path would be zero miles from Earth."
"But that's zero within the limits of prediction," Billy clarified. "There's a very substantial margin of error; that's why the cone was so big."
"I know," Tommy nodded. "But, man, having heard Kat's story, do any of us really think that it's going anywhere else?"
"It could be," Kat said quietly, trying to will it to be true. Tommy put an arm around her and hugged her gently.
"Now that we have a possible reason for Kat's vision, is there anything about this you can look for in the scans you did before?" Adam asked.
Billy shook his head. "No. There's no way of knowing where to look, let alone what to look for. But it's worth noting that we now have a kind of 'baseline' scan for Kat. Kat, we can scan you again later to see if any unexpected differences appear."
Jason frowned. "But for now, we just sit and wait?"
"There is nothing more to be done at the moment, Jason," Zordon answered. "We will receive no further information about the emergency for some time, and we cannot determine any more about the nature of Katherine's experience. We will alert you if either of those changes. Until then, the best thing for you to do is have patience and be cautious."
"We'll get this figured out, Kat, don't worry," Tommy said. The pair were seated at their usual table, watching Jason and Rocky sparring. "How are you feeling?"
"I don't know. Fine, I guess," Kat replied. "I mean, I'm still a bit shaken, obviously."
"Is it fading at all?" Billy asked as he sat down next to Tommy. "Like when you wake up from a nightmare; it's really vivid at first, and then it just vanishes a bit at a time."
Kat shook her head. "No. It's still as vivid as it was when it happened. I can remember it just as well as everything else that happened in the Power Chamber."
Billy nodded. "So it's behaving exactly like any other memory."
"Yeah."
"Then we have to at least consider the possibility that this is, in fact, one of your memories, just... backed up in time."
Kat shook her head. "But I really don't want it to be. It was so terrible, Billy, I can barely begin to describe it."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"Couldn't it be anything else?" Tommy asked, resting a hand on Kat's shoulder. Kat reached up and put her hand over his. "I know you and Zordon looked at everything you could think of, but there's got to be something."
"It could be magical in nature," Billy mused. "Our scans didn't reveal any direct spell-related effects or overt magical influence, but there are other possibilities. But if it's not directly affecting you, Kat..."
"...then there's nothing we can do for now," Kat finished. "I know, and you're probably tired of having to say things like that. I do appreciate it. I'm just really unsettled, and I don't like not being able to get up and fix it."
Tommy nodded sympathetically. "Downside of being a Power Ranger, we don't tend to accept 'nothing we can do,' especially when it's true."
"So focus on what you can do," Billy suggested. "Specifically, you can trust Zordon and Alpha, and me, to do our best to figure this out."
Kat smiled. "Of course I can."
"In the meantime, just try to keep yourself occupied. Who knows? Maybe it won't happen again. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if we never figured it out because it just stopped being an issue."
"Billy," Tommy began, "since you first met Zordon and Rita, has anything ever just stopped being an issue?"
"Well, hope springs eternal."
Katherine's eyes opened wide. Immediately, she made the same check she'd made the two nights since the episode in the Power Chamber: nightmare or vision?
Nightmare. Again. It wasn't night, though. The afternoon sun lit her room brightly, reflecting off her mirror and across her face.
That hadn't been what woke her. Kat groped around the bed, then sighed as she found one of her History texts next to her, the one she'd obviously fallen asleep reading. She was about to sit up and look for whatever disturbed her when she heard it instead, the most familiar six beeps she'd ever hear.
Wide awake now, Kat pulled her communicator up to her face. "I'm here, Zordon."
"Katherine, we need you in the Power Chamber. Even in King Mondo's absence, the Machine Empire is continuing their evil work."
"I'll be right there." Kat spared two seconds to check the mirror to make sure she was presentable, and a third second attempting to shake off the nightmare, before teleporting out.
Immediately upon rematerializing in the Power Chamber, she apologized. "Sorry, sorry. I sort of dozed off studying for History."
"Pretty sure we've all done that," Tanya chuckled.
"Rangers, though your defeat of King Mondo was no small victory, the Machine Empire persists in his absence, and it seems they intend to be active while they await his return. Observe." The screen changed to a view of the park, with a squadron of Cogs taking orders from what looked to be a giant bipedal waste drum. "This is the Crude Dude."
The teens groaned. "Zordon, I've always wanted to ask this," Jason said. "Does it hurt you to have to say these names?"
Zordon, perhaps wisely, did not answer. "The Crude Dude appears to be preparing to pollute the park with oil. If that is Cog oil, it will be immensely difficult to remove, and could cause permanent damage to the lake."
"This isn't the first time they've attacked the environment, or gone after our water," Adam said.
"It may not be original, but it would be quite effective," Zordon acknowledged. "The Crude Dude seems to be a creation of Prince Sprocket."
"Not Louie Kaboom?" Kat asked.
The others turned toward her. "Who's Louie Kaboom?" Tanya asked.
Kat looked ready to answer, then furrowed her brow. "I don't know. It just... came to me, like that's the name I was expecting to hear."
Tommy looked up at their mentor. "Zordon, who's Louie Kaboom?"
"Unfortunately, I am not familiar with that name."
"You all right, Kat?" Rocky asked.
"Oh, just fine," Kat muttered. "I wish I knew what was going on, but I'm fine."
"Don't worry about it, Kat," Tommy said. "We'll figure it all out. For now, let's send Sprocket's windup toy back to the factory. It's morphin' time!"
"Hey, tin head!" the Yellow Ranger shouted. "Keep away from the water! Don't you know you'll rust?"
The Blue Ranger nodded. "That's right; we wouldn't want the recycling plant to reject you when we drop you off!"
The Crude Dude whirled around. "Ah, here you are, just as the Prince promised!" he cackled. "Cogs, attack!"
The Rangers rushed forward to meet the oncoming metal troops, but were startled when two other groups of Cogs burst out of the trees, cutting the Red, Green and Pink Rangers off from the other half of the team.
The Gold Ranger turned around. "Guys, hang on!"
"No, go after the big guy!" Tommy ordered between dodges. "Don't worry about us! We can handle them!"
Jason nodded in acknowledgement. "Rocky, Tanya, you heard the man. Let's get him!"
The Red Ranger ducked under a Cog's wild swing, letting the Cog's momentum carry it into the path of another attacker, cutting off that attack. He took advantage of their confusion to quickly back up toward them, forcing two more Cogs to overextend while attempting to reach him, making them that much easier to dispatch. A grunt from behind him let him know that Adam had handled at least one of those Cogs, and likely had the other one on him. Trusting his teammate to hold his own, he drove forward into another batch.
The Pink Ranger danced out of the way of three blows, then planted herself and deflected two more. Like her red-clad boyfriend, she was taking advantage of the Cogs' occasional tendency to get in each other's, and their own, way. For a split second, the Cogs were tangled in each other, and a split second was all a Ranger ever needed. She leaped into a forward flip over the Cogs, rolling through it to spring up to her feet, and without pausing, threw a vicious spinning kick at the turning Cogs, sending more than one back to the forge.
Across the battlefield, the other three Rangers were finding the Crude Dude a tougher fight than they'd expected. The monster was covered in oil, which, combined with his round shape, meant that most of the Rangers' attacks glanced off him. The Blue Ranger had managed to back him up with a couple of precisely placed strikes, but the Gold Ranger had found himself on the ground after a particularly forceful kick accomplished nothing except depriving him of his balance. He had immediately rolled to the side in case the Crude Dude was considering using his large body as a weapon, only to stumble again trying to stand up, as the oil still coated the sole of his boot.
In the meantime, Rocky and Tanya were covering for him, keeping the Crude Dude under control with less powerful punches and kicks aimed as close to his center point as possible, leading to less deflection. His armor seemed as strong as any other Machine Empire creation, though — clearly, Sprocket's builds were not of noticeably lower quality than his father's — and the lower-strength attacks did not appear to be doing substantial damage.
"Just give me a second, guys!" Jason called, trying to keep his rebellious foot under him. Enough of the oil had rubbed off that he could get back into the fight, albeit cautiously. He adapted his strikes to match his teammates', noting the decreased deflection and much lower amounts of oil they collected. "Now we're making progress!"
"And reinforcements are here!" The Green Ranger immediately picked up on the plan of attack, adding his own precise attacks as the Red and Pink Rangers stayed slightly back to fend off any straggler Cogs. With four Rangers taking shots at him, the Crude Dude was clearly disadvantaged, but he was not backing down.
"We've got to knock him over," the Yellow Ranger called.
"How?" Adam asked, then paused to back away from a punch. "He's ridiculously stable on his feet, and I can't get any leverage!"
"I think this calls for a Karate Kid special," Rocky said with a chuckle. "Sweep the leg!" Putting word to deed, he dropped down and spun, catching the Crude Dude behind his left leg. To his pleasure, the Crude Dude finally stumbled and fell. Unfortunately, the Blue Ranger hadn't fully thought through the consequences of this action, and just barely managed to avoid the slick, rolling Crude Dude.
"Well, now we've got a plan of attack," Tommy said, grinning beneath his helmet even as the Crude Dude managed to stop his roll and stand up. "Go for the legs, Rangers! Take him down!"
Though he successfully righted himself, the Crude Dude found himself facing six Rangers with a very clear idea of his weakness. He attempted to adjust his strategy to match, but the concentration of force was overwhelming. The Rangers got him down a second time, then a third, then a fourth. Dented and damaged, the Crude Dude's fifth fall ended with him rolling into the base of a tree, stopping him quite suddenly and rather upsetting three birds and a squirrel currently occupying the tree.
The Red Ranger called his allies forward. "We've got him now! Time to finish this one off, Rangers!" A chorus of "Right!" answered him.
An oddly accented voice came from their left. "No, not yet, I don't think!"
"Klank!" Tommy shouted, with a tone of voice people usually reserved for words one letter shorter. "Don't you dare!"
The Machine Empire's loyal henchman was not about to listen. "Your fight isn't over, Red Ranger!" Klank replied while preparing to launch Orbus at the Crude Dude. "Around, and around, and away you go!"
Tommy reached up instinctively, as though he could swat the miniature robot out of the air, but Orbus simply sailed over their heads. With Klank's unerring aim, Orbus landed precisely atop the prone Crude Dude, but only for a moment. Like the Rangers, the machines had underestimated the slipperiness of the oil coating the Crude Dude. Orbus simply rolled off the creation's rounded body, stopping some small distance away.
"Oops," Orbus chirped. "But no problems here! I'll just —"
A shadow fell over Orbus. "Uh-oh..."
"Fore!" Jason shouted, and with a swing of his Power Staff, the Gold Ranger sent Orbus flying well off into the distance. A flash of light in his path, along with a matching flash much closer, indicated that the Machine Empire had plucked its flunkies to safety.
"Well, so much for this fight," Jason chuckled.
"Oh, how wrong you are, Gold Ranger!" The Crude Dude was now on his feet again, having taken advantage of Orbus's involuntary distraction to right himself. "I may not be able to step on you, but I'm still ready for Round 2!" He began to charge at Jason, only to stop when he realized that the Gold Ranger had not reacted at all. "Huh?"
With a sweep of his arm, Jason pointed the Golden Power Staff at something some distance behind the mechanical monster. The Crude Dude spun to his left, lacking any simpler way to see where the Gold Ranger was pointing, to discover that the other Rangers had not been idle, either. The five of them now stood around the fully formed Zeo Blaster, which was aimed directly at the Crude Dude's drum.
"Oh."
"Zeo Blaster, fire!" Tommy shouted. The Blaster's energy slammed into the Crude Dude, a direct hit, and within a few seconds, the oil-covered environmental menace was no longer a threat. As the Gold Ranger jumped clear of the blast, the Crude Dude went up in a spectacular explosion; an explosion, Katherine noted, that thankfully did not fling his oil all over the park.
Tommy pumped his fist. "Good work, Rangers! Now Machina and Sprocket know they won't have any more luck than Mondo did. Back to the Power Chamber!"
Billy offered a nod and a smile to the active Rangers as they reappeared in the Power Chamber. "Nicely done, guys. I've studied the oil the Crude Dude brought with him, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to be able to clean up what was left behind without any lasting damage."
"Indeed, you are to be commended, Rangers," Zordon said. "You handled a difficult and unexpected foe with minimal trouble."
"Well, now we know that the Empire's royal family is keeping up their work even while Humpty Mondo tries to put himself together again," Rocky said. "So the next one shouldn't be unexpected. They won't have the element of surprise on their side."
"And while the Crude Dude was pretty dangerous, even Klank and Orbus didn't realize the effect the oil had on him," Tanya pointed out. "It looks like Sprocket isn't as good as Mondo is at noticing potential flaws in his work."
Jason shrugged. "Let's not underestimate the kid. He's inexperienced, but he might be more creative than Mondo. Maybe there's something dangerous Mondo wouldn't try, 'cause he wouldn't think it'd work, but that Sprocket will."
"Not to mention that Machina's still active, too, and both of them have plenty of other robots around to point out flaws, and the entire infrastructure of the Machine Empire to support them," Tommy added.
"Jeez, you two," Rocky cracked with an exaggerated sigh. "What is it about leading this team that gives people a case of the bringdowns?"
Tommy tried to hide his smile by gazing pensively at the ceiling of the Power Chamber. "Oh, I don't know, Rocky. It could be the constant danger, the threat to civilians, the grudges that evil aliens seem to have against each of us personally, the tendency of —"
Katherine crouched beside the river, grimacing at the smell; either it was too strong for her helmet's filters, or her Ranger uniform had lost enough power that the filters were no longer functional. Shuddering, she tentatively reached in, letting the discolored water flow through her fingers. "It's not noticeably different to the touch, I don't think," she said, looking back over her shoulder. "But it hasn't been that long. What could be causing this?"
Adam offered her a shrug from a few paces back. "I'm not the person to be asking," the Green Ranger said. "It could be anything. If the Heart could black out the sky and still give us this gross light, I don't think it's beyond its reach to make a river smell like a corpse."
"It smells like a lot more than one corpse," the Pink Ranger muttered. She was about to stand again, but a memory stopped her. "It's the second vision," she said, louder than she had intended. "Well, my second vision."
"Yeah, I remember," Adam acknowledged. "Of course. I'd say it's less disconcerting from this side of the timeline, but that'd be a pretty awful lie. We didn't know everything back then." His voice faltered a bit. "Didn't know who we were up against. Didn't know what we'd lose." He took a deep breath, audible through his helmet, in an attempt to steady himself. "But I guess now we do know what the Sunset was, and why we were calling all this —"
"—the Last Night."
"Kat!" As comprehension returned, Kat felt Tommy's legs under her head. She'd collapsed again. Tommy must have used his legs as a pillow to keep her head off the floor; he'd been close enough to catch her this time.
"Talk to me, Kat. Are you with us?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I am. Oh, no," she added, as the experience rushed back into her head. "It was even worse this time, Tommy. I was..." she trailed off for a moment as her eyes focused on the others in the Power Chamber. "Adam!"
The Green Ranger was on the floor a few feet away from Kat, with Rocky and Tanya attending to him. She was grateful to see that Adam, too, was awake, but that feeling vanished as Rocky helped him sit up and she was able to see the look on his face.
"I saw it, too, Kat," he whispered, staring directly into her eyes. "I saw it all."
"All of what?" Jason was all business, more Red Ranger than Gold Ranger now, looking back and forth between the collapsed Rangers, but his concern was evident in his tone. "You both said something when the vision ended. 'The Last Night?'"
Both Kat and Adam nodded.
"What's the Last Night?" Tanya asked.
"Never mind that for now," Tommy said, aiding Kat in standing up as Rocky and Tanya did the same for Adam. "That's the future if it's anything at all. Billy, do we know what happened here in the present?"
"Yeah, is this contagious?" Rocky shook his head. "Because the last thing we need is for the six of us to take a seat and stare at nothing the next time we're fighting a Machine Empire monster."
Billy was hard at work at one of the Power Chamber consoles. "I'm doing my best, guys, but I haven't found anything yet. As far as our scans go, everything on both of you looks well within normal — well, your heart rates are understandably a bit elevated right now, but I see nothing beyond that."
Kat suddenly took a few steps toward Adam. "Adam, in the vision, you mentioned 'the Heart.' You said 'the Heart' was doing something. Do you remember?"
"Yes. The Heart blacked out the sky." Adam grimaced. "Looks like we have an answer to one of our questions."
Kat looked up at Zordon. "I think we can be pretty sure that whatever's going on, the Heart of Turmoil is responsible for it."
"That hypothesis does fit the available evidence."
"But the scans are clean," Billy said with a hint of frustration. "I can't find anything on either one of you that would explain this. I can't even find anything that stands out as abnormal when compared to previous scans of you."
"What if it's not on them?" Tanya asked. "What if it's something around them? We could have brought something back with us that triggered this."
"Good thought," Billy mused, turning back to the computer. "I don't believe you brought anything with you; it's difficult to explain Kat's first experience in that way. But we haven't run any environmental scans yet. Maybe we should."
"Could be this Heart, too," Tommy pointed out. "If we believe it causes whatever Kat and Adam saw, it's not hard to believe it's causing them to see it, too."
Rocky frowned. "But the Heart is still way far away, isn't it? How could it be affecting them here?"
"Time isn't exactly a straight line from A to B to C once magic gets involved," Billy began to explain as he queued a new scan. "The magic turns it into more of a... ball. A ball of water, we'll say. A, B and C are all on the ball somewhere, but without a set order. Sure, there's a line of land connecting them, but you can leave the land and swim from C to B to A, or A to C to B, and from a linear viewpoint, you'll start to see causality violated. Effects will happen before causes. The more magic, the worse it gets."
"I think I'm following you," Rocky said. "But it's weird to me that we're seeing the effects of something that hasn't actually happened."
"Have you ever dropped a rock in a lake?" Billy asked. "What happens? It sends out a bunch of little ripples, right? And those ripples go..."
"...in every direction," Rocky finished. "Yeah, I get it. Drop a rock at point C, and we'll see the ripples at A and B before C."
Billy nodded. "It's a workable metaphor, if a bit inelegant. But it manages..." he trailed off. "This isn't right. Something must have thrown the scanners off. Maybe there's a residual effect of some kind." He looked down the console toward Alpha. "Alpha, can you rerun this scan, please?"
"Of course," Alpha agreed.
"What did you see?" Tommy asked, walking over to Billy's console to inspect the results himself.
"It's basically meaningless," Billy apologized. "The results are junk. I must have done something wrong, because the scan didn't do what I asked for."
"Find it hard to believe you did something wrong," Tommy said with a smile. "Alpha, how soon before we have the new scan results?"
"They're coming through now, Tommy!"
The new results replaced the old ones on the console screen. To Tommy's eyes, they looked identical. "I don't see a difference," he said tentatively after a few moments.
Billy was rubbing his face hard. "I don't, either," he sighed. "So we have a tremendous problem."
"What's wrong?" Jason asked.
"The scans still show that nothing's wrong and nothing has changed in Kat or Adam," Billy said, isolating one part of the scan. "See how they're green? There's nothing about them that the scanner thinks even warrants a second look. But look." He pulled back on the scan image to show the rest of the Power Chamber, along with all its inhabitants. There was a distinct red color to the remainder of the image. "Everything else in here, and I do mean everything, is being flagged by the scanner as abnormal. Including us, and the scanner itself."
Kat and Adam glanced at each other, each unconsciously moving a step or two closer to the other. "But that doesn't make sense," Kat said.
"Not a bit of sense," Billy agreed. "But Alpha and I both ran the scan, and we both got the same results. Because of his time warp, Zordon will always return an abnormal result, and it wouldn't be unheard of for the effect to extend a bit beyond his tube. But this is the entire Power Chamber, with everything and everyone in it save you two, and it's definitely not centered on Zordon. It's all — we're all — registering exactly as off as everything else."
"But that doesn't make sense," Rocky repeated Kat's words a bit more forcefully. "Something's got to be wrong. I mean, it's like relativity, isn't it? If the computer's become equally abnormal, it should be considering it and everything else normal, because that's its frame of reference."
"And then Kat and Adam would show up as abnormal, because they don't fit," Billy continued. "That's what you'd expect in such a situation. I can't even think of what could give us these results instead."
"But these are the results we have," Tanya said. "So what do they mean?"
Billy took a deep breath. "They mean something's deeply wrong. They mean reality is deeply wrong. Somehow, the scanner is able to recognize that it is not what it would be expected to be." He sighed. "And neither are we."
Jason stared at the screen, eyebrows knit. "So one of those ripples you were talking about just... knocked us out of reality?"
"Not out," Billy clarified. "We are still real, I promise. Think of it more like half a step out of sync, or a beat ahead of or behind the tune."
Tommy turned to Zordon, frowning. "All due respect, Zordon, what the hell could knock us half a step out of sync with reality itself?"
"I can think of nothing we would not have already noticed."
"Other than the Heart of Turmoil?"
"I cannot say for sure that this is among its capabilities. However, among the possibilities of which we are aware, I would say that it is the only potential cause for what we are experiencing."
"So how do we get back in sync?" Rocky asked. "Or, for that matter, should we? I mean, no offense, Adam and Kat, but if you're the ones who are in sync..."
"We get it," Kat acknowledged with a slightly bitter smile. "Whatever it is we're seeing, you don't want to."
"I don't think we have a way to get back, so to speak, to what we're supposed to be." Billy was looking at his console again. "I've extended the scan as far as our detectors can reach — even boosted the range with a few satellites I probably shouldn't have used — and, well, it's the same everywhere. Our scanner is somehow able to distinguish between what is and what isn't as it should be, and at any distance that matters, only Kat and Adam fit into the first category."
Tanya closed her eyes and exhaled sharply. "So... does that mean it's time to panic?"
"Absolutely not." Zordon was firm. "Remember what Rocky said about frames of reference. In a scientific sense, it is noteworthy that Katherine and Adam are somehow recognized as 'correct,' but the difference between 'correct' and 'incorrect' currently has no practical effect. If this is being, or will be, caused by the Heart of Turmoil, it is likely incomprehensible anyway, and if the Heart is headed for Earth, it must be the focus of our efforts."
"In the meantime, we've still got the Machine Empire to worry about," Tommy said.
"That is correct. Katherine, Adam, I see no reason you cannot continue in your duties as Rangers for now, but if you are not comfortable doing so, we can find alternatives."
"I'm good," Adam said. "No matter what this is, I'd rather face it with my powers than without."
"Likewise," Kat nodded. "I won't be going anywhere, no matter what."
"That's what it means to be a Power Ranger," Jason said with a grin.
Tommy hugged Kat, trying to lend her some comfort. "Yeah. Proud of you both."
"Hey, Kat."
Kat looked up from her homework and gave Adam a small smile. "Hi, Adam," she said. "What's up?"
Adam fidgeted a bit. "Well, you can probably guess."
"Yes, but it was worth asking." Kat had chosen a table away from most of the crowd, and now she glanced around the Youth Center, somewhat pleased to see the other Rangers weren't there. "Take a seat."
Adam did, resting his elbows on the table and his head on his hands. "I didn't think I really wanted to talk about this. I hope you're all right with it."
Kat shrugged. "We're going to have to discuss it sometime."
"It's just..." Adam stopped a moment to collect his thoughts. "In the vision, or the future experience, or whatever it was, that version of me was incredibly sad. Even when we came out of it, I felt like I'd been given the worst news of my life, and then punched by a Cog while trying to process it."
"What we saw was deeply depressing. Horrifying, actually," Kat said. "So that sounds like a reasonable response. I felt pretty terrible both times, myself."
"Yeah, but there's something deeper there. Something terrible. I've been sad before, but I've never felt such an intense combination of loss and resignation. I've never felt so completely defeated. But that's exactly what I felt there, and I'd guess it's what you felt, too."
It was Kat's turn to take time to collect her thoughts. "Yes, it is. But I didn't think of it like that, because... well, because I have felt that way before."
Adam had been staring at the table; now his eyes shot to Kat's face. "What? When?"
"When I broke free of Rita's spell, and realized and remembered everything I had done, and then rushed in here just to see Kimberly fall." Kat shook her head. "I just felt like I had failed, and lost, in every important way. If somebody had walked in and shot me right then and there, I would probably have died thinking I deserved it."
"I'm sorry, Kat," Adam said. "I didn't know."
"I didn't advertise it. But getting back to your point, yes, you're right. The way I feel in those visions, while it's not exactly the same as I felt then, is very close to it. Too close."
"Right. And that got me thinking, as much as I didn't want to. What we were looking at was awful, but we've seen awful stuff before. And we were out in the open, and morphed; we weren't captured, we weren't beaten, and if we were facing some tremendous magic, well, so what? We've overcome any magic our friends on the moon have thrown in our way in the past. We're Power Rangers; we're strong people, Kat. Stronger than we probably give ourselves credit for. So what could possibly make us feel like we had completely lost?"
Adam could tell by the look in Kat's eyes that she was thinking the same thing he was, but she didn't want to say it. Adam didn't want to, either, but he couldn't help himself.
"Kat, I don't want to watch our friends die."