Me No Own.
Chapter One: Despair
She didn't know what day it was, or what time. She didn't know how long she'd been hanging by her arms in the cold, damp cell, nor did she really care. She was in so much pain from whatever the dino freak was doing to her, or rather trying to do to her, that she had spent most of her time there semi-conscious; her mind going through her past as the black Spirit Ranger.
FLASH
The power has chosen you. You are the Thunderbird; rising from the depths of despair and imprisonment to fly again. This is your destiny…
FLASH
Fighting. Always fighting. Duck, spin kick, dodge. Get hit, fall and get right back up. Her teammates, nowhere in sight. She was alone again, as she always was.
FLASH
The spirit of the Thunderbird seeming to fight within her for a moment, what he was fighting, she didn't know. In her mind's eye his feathers faded from their normal ink black to an almost iridescent green before snapping back to black, almost as if forced to be that color…
FLASH
The Spirit Rangers stood around the remains of their foe. They'd finally won.
One by one they left. Warren first, his time as the blue badger ranger over for good, or so he hoped; going back to his life of race cars and sports.
Next was Alicia, the yellow serpent; back to her own life as a teenaged genius, back to university and the life of an accredited chemist.
Then Gus left; the white bear. He went back to his life as a mechanic and inventor; patents pending on four inventions that were guaranteed to go global very soon.
Theo stayed a bit longer, just staring at the smoldering remains of their enemy's base, standing five feet away from her and not even registering her presence. The red cougar; the leader of the team; also a football star at the high school and a local hero.
Finally Sasha, the pink gazelle, was the last to leave her standing there alone. Sasha was going back to her life as a model and actress, a posh life that she'd never really left, not even as a ranger.
They were the most mis-matched team in the history of the rangers, their powers not so much choosing them as simply falling to them. Except for her, her power was hers and hers alone, the thunderbird singing in joy, gloating to the other spirits that he had found his home while they had to settle for close matches. She stood, looking at the smoldering pile that had been their enemy's stronghold and mourned. She mourned for her enemies, knowing that some were once innocent and deserved her tears.
FLASH
That had been nearly a year before her capture in her home town of Ruby Point. The rangers had fought the evil overlord known only as Malvinoa and his ilk for a year and a half before that and had finally won after an all out assault on his base of operations. It was a long, hard battle, but in the end they emerged victorious and all without alerting the various other ranger teams of their existence. They had gone on with their lives as normal, never really hung out together, never really changed, just added rangering on the side. So she had remained lonely, without friends her age; she had kept up the apartments where she lived and kept cooking for some of the home-bound residents. Nothing in her life really changed except that she would come home with bruises and untreated wounds and her purchasing of first aid equipment went up drastically. Finally the apartment manager had gotten an actual super who knew what they were doing and she'd been expelled from school because of her reputation. She'd known that the school had wanted to kick her out since she'd arrived, but they hadn't been able to until her guardian, the landlady of the complex where she lived, had died. The kind elderly woman had left her a house out in the woods around a town called Reefside, where there was a public high school, so she'd packed up and had actually been on the way there when some freaky cyborg looking guy had come out of nowhere and grabbed her. Now she hung, where she'd hung for who knows how long, her body twitching with pain as the green gem that the dino freak had been trying to push on her pulsed sickly.