Midnight came swiftly to the tiny town of Handlers Corner, softly covering the buildings and the surrounding salt flats in a veil of obsidian blackness. To the outside eye it would appear that the town was dead, all its occupants soundly asleep. Well almost all of them.
Sage sighed, rubbing her hands over her tired eyes, a trait that she had picked up from her human friends. Normally she would be in her hibernation mode, deeply recharging for the next day, but tonight her mind was far too full to even consider the possibility of shutting down. Earlier her friends, the legendary Battle Force 5 had responded to her call of a storm shock, racing off to do battle against her fearsome twin brother Krytus and his red sentient warriors. Sadly being legendary did not make her team invincible, and Krytus had proven just how vulnerable they truly were. Her twin had ruthlessly ripped his way through the battle force 5, injuring both the drivers and their vehicles to the point that they had barely been able to get the key and get themselves back through the portal.
To say that she had been frightened was an understatement. It had taken her hours to treat all of their injuries. Since then she had spent all of her time in front of the screens of the mobi, desperately trying to figure out a way to prevent an event like this from ever happening again. The Battle Force 5 were her and the earths only line of defense, if they fell to her brother, they were both doomed. Sadly none of the ideas she had run had come out with the statistics she had wanted, and she had forced her self to walk away from the project before her frustration got the better of her.
As she left the Mobi, she noticed a flicker of light coming from the den area of the hub. Frowning she made her way over, trying to remember if she had left any lights on. It was highly unlikely that she had, but after today she supposed it was possible. She stopped just inside the door way, blinking in surprise before a small, warm, smile stretched across her face.
The entire team was gathered on the large black couch in the center of the room in front of the giant TV, which was the source of the flickering light that had alerted her. Despite their injuries they had all managed to maneuver themselves into positions that left little to no space in between them. Vert sat in the middle, his chest still bandaged from the sword wound he had taken from Krytus. His face, which had been drawn in pain earlier, was now relaxed as he slept. His right arm was draped over Agura's shoulders, while his left hand rested protectively on Zoom's head. On his left was Stanford, who was leaning carefully against his leader in order to take the pressure off of his bruised and cracked ribs. The reverb had taken a nasty hit from Kyrosys, and even now the British man's breathing still sounded labored. Sherman was next, one arm thrown over the back of the couch behind Stanford's head, the other was wrapped around his brother. The taller brother's head was wrapped in bandages where it had smacked rather forcefully into front dashboard of the buster when they had been rammed by Krylox. Spinner was hardly better off than his brother, laying half way across his younger brother in order to give his splinted ankle room to stretch out. Agura was on Vert's right, her head resting heavily on her leader's shoulder. She had suffered deep lacerations across her abdomen from her fight with Kyburi, as well as severe bruising from her seat belt, which made breathing rather difficult for the African huntress. Zoom was stretched out across both of his team mates with his head resting on Vert's lap. The scout had suffered from a broken collarbone after taking on Kytren, and setting it had been a nightmare. Sage winced, remembering the scout's screams of pain as she had been forced to splint and manipulate his arm into the correct position across his chest in order to relieve the pressure off of the fractured bone.
As she stood in the door way, watching her friends sleep in the reassuring presence of their teammates, Sage could not help but to marvel at them. Humans were such delicate creatures, almost more easily damaged than she was. Yet they possessed a resilience that she had never seen in any species, not even her own. These humans in particular demonstrated this quality. Time and time again they had taken many painful injuries at the hands of the vandals, sark, and red sentient, yet they had never failed to bounce back, returning to their war with more determination than before. They defended her and the earth with everything they possessed, even going so far as to completely abandon any regard for their own lives. Sometimes the thought of one of them dying, for her scared her more than Krytus ever could.
Sage had always been grateful for the love and protection the Battle Force 5 always offered her, but there were moments, when she sent the six of them hurtling into unknown and potentially lethal battle zones to fight in a war that was never theirs to begin with, where she questioned what gave them the strength to continue what many would call a fruitless struggle? How did they possibly keep going? As she stood there and watched Vert gently smooth his fingers through Zooms hair in an effort to soothe him when the younger boy whimpered in his sleep, Sage finally felt that she understood. They pulled the strength to continue from one another. When they fought, it was with the knowledge that they did not fight alone. They kept their faith in their team and in their goal, and when things fell apart as they had today, they used that faith to scrape themselves back together and keep pushing forward.
Smiling, she silently turned off the T.V. and made her way out of the room, throwing them one final glance before making her way into the mobi to get some well deserved rest of her own. As she walked past the screens she had been using earlier, an idea came to her, something that was as unique as her friends, a process which would take their individual strengths and fuse them together into something greater than they could ever be separately. Storing that idea in her data banks for later, she went into her shut down routine, confident that her team would be there in the morning.