"Trent," Haley called, "you need to talk to Tommy. I know that you haven't yet."
"Why do I need to talk to him? Did something happen?" he asked his boss. He couldn't think of any reason he would need to speak with the team mentor.
"Just trust me. Take this afternoon off and go to his house. Ethan and Kira are planning on forcing Connor to study so he can get his grades up, and it's a weekday, so we probably won't have many people in today. Now, go," she told him.
"Dr. O, are you here?" Trent called as he knocked on the door.
"Hey, what are you doing here? I thought you had to work," Tommy said once he opened the door.
"Haley told me that I needed to talk to you and gave me the afternoon off. I'm not really sure why."
"I was planning on asking her to send you here tomorrow so we could talk. I guess she beat me to it. Come down into the basement, we can talk there."
"Why do you want to talk to me and not the others?" Trent asked, confused and concerned… he'd only been on the team for a few weeks and didn't know what was going on.
"You've been isolating yourself from the others. I just wanted to talk about why. Plus, the others got to watch a video history of the rangers, and I thought you deserved to see it, too," Tommy told him, walking over to the monitors to pull up the video.
"I haven't been isolating myself," he said, defensive.
"Trent," Dr. Oliver looked at him, "I'm your teacher, and teachers are trained to spot when something is wrong, so don't even try that with me, and I am your friend. I hope that I know enough about you and the others to recognize things like this."
"Nothing is wrong, Dr. O. Nothing you can help with anyway."
"Ah, I thought so," Tommy said, leaning back against the desk, "I know that look better than anyone."
"How… what do you mean?"
The teacher's look softened in memory, "Did the others tell you anything about my past and the history of the rangers?"
"No."
"I didn't think so. I was the sixth ranger to be called. The original five had been fighting together for months before I moved to Angel Grove, and they had been friends for a long time before Zordon called them…," Tommy then explained how the original five were called, their zords, and their communicators. "They stopped Rita Repulsa so many times that she decided to play her trump card. Before she was imprisoned on the moon, Rita had stolen one of the power coins. I had been in time less than three days when she sent her putties to test me. When I passed her test, she kidnapped me and made me into her green ranger. In less than a week, I destroyed the link to Zordon, utterly destroyed the zords, put viruses in all of the computer systems in the Command Center which caused them to have to rewire everything, kidnapped the red ranger Jason, almost killed him, almost killed the others four on one, and demolished almost half of Angel Grove. I came very close to killing the entire team. I can understand what you're going through because I am the original evil ranger."
Trent didn't know what to say… their mentor had been evil?
Tommy, seeing that his student was confused, continued with his story, "Out of all of the creatures that Rita and her husband Zedd created, I am the one that came the closest to destroying the world. Trent, compared to me, your days as the evil ranger barely made a blip."
"But Dr. O, you were evil for a few days, I was evil for weeks! I almost destroyed Reefside!"
Tommy laughed humorlessly, "I was evil for a week that time and did destroy half of Angel Grove. Can you imagine how much damage I would've done if I hadn't been stopped? That time, Jason stopped me by destroying the sword that anchored Rita's spell. She got her revenge by destroying my powers and nearly killing me. That was my first time being evil and the first time I lost my powers. I have worn four different colors and held six different sets of powers. Green was first, then two sets of white, two sets of red, and now black. When I received my first set of white powers, I was told that they were designed to be good… that as long as I held them, I could not be turned again…. That aspect of them worked fine, but then the entire team lost their powers twice. I ended up as the red ranger. For awhile, everything was normal, but then I was kidnapped. King Mondo of the Machine Empire brainwashed me into thinking I was his son. I trapped the other rangers in a forcefield that prevented communications, teleporting, and morphing. We ended up fighting in an arena filled with monsters. I nearly killed them all before they broke through the programming Mondo had done. To get through to me, they had to demorph. If Billy hadn't broken through the shield and teleported us out, we would've been overrun in seconds, and it would've all been my fault." Tommy let Trent mull things over for a few minutes while he made sure the video diary was finished loading, "I know this is a lot to take in. It's not every day you find out your teacher was once a bigger evil than Messagog and Elsa combined. I was going to show you this video before I told you all of this, but I changed my mind when I saw your reactions earlier. I am going to go upstairs and start supper now. When it's over, I'm sure you'll have questions. Come and find me. I'll try to answer them," Tommy stated as he walked up the stairs into his house. "Oh and Trent, two of my ex-girlfriends and my best friend have all been evil at some point, too. You are not alone in this."
Trent sat down and did as his mentor asked. He had never thought that there had been so many teams. He had known about Ninja Storm and that there had been a team in Angel Grove, but the numbers had never really registered. Once he finished the video and let it sink in, he walked to Dr. O's kitchen and sat down. Tommy put a plate of spaghetti and a soda in front of him and told him, "Eat. You can ask questions when you're ready."
They ate in silence for about twenty minutes, each gathering their thoughts before Trent asked, "How did you get over what you did?"
Tommy sighed, "It took a long time, and I don't think it'll ever be completely gone from my mind. Images of what I did fill my nightmares even now. My friends helped a lot, even when I didn't want them to. At first, I didn't think they would care. It wasn't until Kat joined the team that I understood their side of it. She had been put under a spell and forced to steal Kimberly's power coin. After we saved her, Kimberly decided to move to Florida and told Kat to keep the coin. I had to sit her down and talk to her just like I'm doing now. Back to your original question though, it will take time, but how much will depend on you. Let the others in… it will help in the long run. Jason, Kim, and Kat helped me the most. Ironically, all three of them had been turned evil at some point."
"How much did you leave out of the video?"
"If I could get around telling that someone had been evil, I did. It's bad enough that some of us start out evil… there is no need for future rangers to know any more about that side of the powers than they have to. It is not my story to tell. I've been turned evil so many times that it would've been impossible to leave it out. After we get rid on Messagog and Elsa, I'll update the video again. I'm sorry to say that I have to show that you were evil. To future rangers, you'll be the fourth evil ranger, but the truth is much worse than that. The evils that come after us are crafty. They will do anything and everything to kill us, and if that doesn't work, they'll try to destroy us from the inside. It might've started with Rita, but the legacy of the evil rangers has become a long one. Thankfully, every single one of them has had people that they could rely on, friends and teammates to stop them."