Chapter 10: A dire wolf.
RJ and Billy were working together on a console that had a couple dozen cables connected to it. They were working in a silence RJ was starting to find oppressive and he wished Billy would say something, anything, to break it.
Billy glanced at his former friend and took a deep breath. "RJ," he called. "This is interfering."
RJ looked around for what it was that was interfering, only to notice that he didn't know what was being interfered with. "What do you mean?"
"This," Billy said, pointing at them both. "This silence, this tension. If we are going to work together, we need to work as a team, and this is not a team. It's not even an alliance."
"I can only say I'm sorry so many times, Billy."
"And you haven't meant it one single time " Billy accused, putting the screwdriver down and looking straight at RJ, who put down his tool as well and stood straight. "And that's fine. You had your reasons to do what you did, to disappear, to pretend you were dead..."
"I was captured by Venjix."
"That's your story and you're sticking to it, I get it," Billy dismissed and RJ huffed his frustration to Billy not believing him. "I need to know that I can still trust you."
RJ chuckled as if the idea was ridiculous. "Of course, you can trust me."
"Right," Billy said, rolling his eyes. "Except you lie and you tell half-truths so often, I think you don't even remember how to be honest."
"I know I wasn't the best friend ever..."
"That is not true. You are a great friend, albeit a rather peculiar one," the former blue ranger said. "You were also a great master and I regretted losing you on both accounts."
RJ smirked sheepishly. "Thanks."
"Anyway, I need to know that when push comes to shove, you will be honest."
"I always am," RJ insisted. Billy raised an eyebrow and the wolf master added: "When push comes to shove."
"I think this situation qualifies."
"It definitely does."
"There are three things I've always wanted to know about you, I would like to ask those three questions and I want you to be one-hundred-percent honest."
"This isn't about the Venjix time, is it?"
"No. I've wondered these things long before Venjix."
RJ smiled his pleasant, welcoming smile and nodded. "Alright then, fire away."
"First, what does the R stand for?" Billy asked point blank.
RJ snickered. "Robert. My first name is Robert."
Billy showed no reaction to that. "Two, are you older than you look?"
"That depends," RJ started. "How old do I look?"
"Late twenties."
"Then, yes."
RJ expected Billy to push for a more detailed answer, but the other man simply asked his last question: "Where are you from?"
The violet ranger was taken aback by the question but knew he shouldn't lie. So, he stalled. "What do you mean? You know where I come from."
"You weren't born in Ocean Bluff. Where were you born?"
"Oh," RJ swallowed hard but knew this was not a moment to lie. "Holland. I was born in Holland."
"You're Dutch?" Billy seemed genuinely surprised.
"That's what they call people who were born in Holland, yes."
"Dutch," Billy muttered and then shrugged. "Alright then, I'm going to assume you were honest on all three questions." He smiled at RJ. "Thank you for your honesty."
"I was honest on all three answers," RJ told him, smiling back.
"Yes," Billy said, picking up his screwdriver again. "It adds up."
"Adds up to what?" RJ asked, picking up his own custom tool.
"You," Billy said with a shrug.
While they were doing that, Bridge was on the other side of the lab, helping Jen set up the surveillance system. They were planning to use the city's own cameras but keeping it isolated from the lab and the time ship, in case Venjix had infected the city's systems.
"There are so many cameras," Bridge said, with a slight tone of despair.
"Yeah, but I guess they needed this many."
"Still, how are we going to keep up with a surveillance system this big? It would take a legion of people to monitor these!"
"We don't need a legion of people," Jen said, pressing a circle on her gauntlet to bring up the list of items she had available to her. "Because we have this," she tapped the hologram of the list and a small device materialized on the table, right under her hand.
"That thing is like magic," Bridge commented, his eyes fixed on the gauntlet.
"I know, I'm still trying to get used to it myself," she said. She took the device and showed it to him. "This device has an algorithm that will scan the cameras for us, so we don't have to waste time sitting here looking at the feeds."
She placed the device next to the console she had conjured from the ship a couple of days prior and the device turned on, a small circle of little blue lights blinking as it read the system.
"Now, we have programmed the Venjix attack robot models and configurations as far as we know," Jen told Bridge. "The device will look for them in rapid succession and alert us if something goes-" She was interrupted by the little device making a high-pitched noise, its little blue lights turning red, and the feed from a single camera taking up the whole screen.
"Looks like it found grinders," she said.
Billy and RJ looked up when she said that and RJ pointed at the screen, his face suddenly very pale. "That's a block away from Jungle Karma Pizza!"
The device, still making the high-pitched noise, changed the feed to another camera, closer to RJ's restaurant.
"They're going to Jungle Karma Pizza," RJ said and left the room, running out of the lab as fast as he could.
Jen ran after him, followed by Billy and Bridge.
They ran all the way to the restaurant, both Billy's car and RJ's jeep forgotten in the urgency of the moment, and arrived to find chaos unfolding.
Jen, Billy and Bridge arrived slightly after RJ, who had run a lot faster than them, to find that RJ's employees, Lauren and Chip, were holding the fort quite well, against at least two dozen Grinders.
The restaurant seemed to be free of customers and Chip was kicking his way through the Grinders with relative ease, trying to find a point of advantage to fire the bow he was holding. Lauren was slicing through Grinders with a large sword that she was handling expertly.
But surprising as this image was, the most shocking one was RJ.
The calm, easy-going chef who had spent the last couple of days with them at the garage had transformed into a completely different man.
Jen had had the impression that he looked like a wild animal the night she had first seen him, and now she knew why. He was behaving like a wild animal, completely out of control.
He wasn't fighting the Grinders trying to enter his restaurant, holding them back or even knocking them out. He was tearing them apart with his bare hands, viciously pulling off limb by limb, throwing them against the walls with some kind of superhuman strength that made the robots shatter when they hit.
He was yelling angrily, moving fast and hitting hard, until he finally tore apart the last of the Grinders. He looked around like a caged animal, breathing heavily, his hands and arms scratched and bleeding. His eyes were a dark shade of violet, not their usual bright blue, and he was visibly shaking with anger.
Lauren and Chip were paralyzed looking at him and so were the other three.
"Are there any more of them?" RJ asked in a voice so deep it sounded like a growl.
Nobody answered, as they were all in shock from his behavior.
"WELL?!" He yelled, in Chip and Lauren's direction.
"None inside," Chip choked out.
RJ ran his bleeding hands through his hair and looked around desperately. He kneeled and picked up from the floor the silver ring that usually hung around his neck from a leather cord. He wrapped the cord around his neck and as soon as the knot was tied his eyes turned back to blue.
Next to her, Jen felt Bridge shaking and turned to see the officer pale and covered in a light coat of cold sweat.
"Bridge, are you alright?" She asked softly.
Bridge shook his head, but said nothing, his eyes glued to RJ.
Meanwhile, RJ was addressing his employees in a not very friendly tone.
"What the hell did you two think you were doing?" He all but yelled.
"Saving your restaurant," Lauren snapped back.
"My restaurant? What does my restaurant matter? You should have been saving your lives! Why didn't you run?"
"Because you left the restaurant in our hands and we were doing as you asked!" Lauren answered, obviously getting mad at his lack of gratitude.
"I left you in charge of making pizzas and serving customers, not fighting grinders!"
"Well, we know how to fight grinders," she snapped back. "We were doing just fine!"
"What if we hadn't known about this? What if we hadn't shown up to help you?!"
"Who's 'we' exactly?" Lauren asked. "You were the only one tearing robots apart with his bare hands. Your friends didn't even have time to get anywhere near the restaurant before you had destroyed them all yourself!"
"What if I hadn't been here to help you?!"
"Like I said, we would have been fine!" Lauren yelled. Chip put a hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off. "We can fight too, you know?"
"Really?! The girl who had a panic attack after seeing a patrol of grinders is telling me she has it in her to go face first against them?"
"Yes! That was exactly what I was doing, in case you didn't notice, in your eagerness to be the one tearing robots apart!" She pointed out. "I am a samurai! I do not run, I fight until the end!"
"What you did two nights ago was the exact definition of running!" He spat, prompting Chip to try to position himself between the shouting RJ and Lauren. Jen and Billy also approached them, but Bridge stayed on the other side of the street, pale and paralyzed. "What made you so brave this time?" RJ asked, grabbing Lauren's sword by the blade and pulling it out of her hand. "This little piece of metal doesn't make any real difference, Lauren! It is an useless trinket!" He yelled, throwing the sword away.
"HOW DARE YOU?!" She yelled at the top of her lungs. "THAT SWORD WAS MY FATHER'S AND NOW IT IS MINE! MY WARRIOR SPIRIT RESIDES IN IT!"
"IT IS A SWORD! DON'T LIE TO YOURSELF, IT IS NOT YOU WARRIOR SPIRIT, IT'S JUST A HINDRANCE! JUST LIKE ALL OTHER SWORDS!"
"MY SAMURAI SWORD IS A PART OF ME!" She yelled, moving to pick her sword up. "I can show you exactly how good with it I am right now!"
"I'd love to see you try!" RJ growled.
"ENOUGH!" Jen yelled, startling everybody. RJ and Lauren stood there, looking at each other, but everybody else was looking at Jen. "I believe you owe Lauren an apology," she told RJ.
"I don't owe anything to anyone," he growled and walked, past Chip, inside the building.
"What is wrong with him?" Chip asked. "He's not like that, he's never like that!"
Jen shrugged at him, and Billy put a hand on her shoulder. She looked at him and he pointed towards Bridge with his chin.
Jen walked back to the green ranger and put a hand on his shoulder. "Are you alright?"
He looked at her. "There was a dire wolf," he whispered in terror.
"A dire wolf?"
"Around RJ, when he was fighting. It was like a wolf but it was very dark, almost black, and so fierce, so angry... it tainted RJ's purple aura with black. It made RJ evil or something."
"It wasn't a dire wolf, Bridge," she said. "I think you saw RJ's animal spirit. He said it's a wolf."
"If that creature is his animal spirit then he is more dangerous than I thought at first."
Billy had approached them too and said: "The wolf animal spirit is dangerous. It's difficult to control." He smiled softly at Bridge, putting his hand in the pocket of his jeans. "RJ is not evil, Bridge, and neither is his wolf. He's just angry, I guess."
"That wasn't anger," Bridge said, shaking his head. "I've seen anger, that was rage. That was someone going berserk."
"Maybe," Billy agreed. "I noticed there was something different with him but I couldn't place it. Now I know."
"What is it?" Jen asked.
"My wolf can't feel his wolf anymore. I can't feel his animal spirit at all, it's like he's empty of it."
"That wolf was there," Bridge insisted. "I saw it."
"I don't deny that," Billy agreed. "I felt it when he was fighting, very angry, hurt and hungry; very unlike RJ's calm, easy-going wolf that I used to know. But then it was completely gone again."
RJ was walking out of the building, locking the door behind him. He handed Lauren and Chip their bags and coats.
"Go home, both of you."
"No," Lauren said defiantly, dropping her bag and coat on the ground. "I want to help in the fight against Venjix."
"Me too!" Chip said, in a voice that tried to sound more confident than he really felt. RJ turned to look at him and he swallowed hard but stood his ground. "We are Power Rangers too."
"Power Rangers who can't morph!" RJ reminded them.
"You said you could fix my morpher!" Lauren said. "Do it! Fix it! Let me fight with you!"
"The stakes are much higher than we originally thought-"
"Which is why you need us now more than before!" She insisted. "Let us fight with you!"
"This isn't game! This isn't something to laugh about at the end of the day. Go home and-"
"Let the grown-ups take care of it?" She interrupted. "You are not the only one who lost people to Venjix, you know?"
"I do!" He answered, and it sounded like a bark. "I know you lost someone and I know Chip lost someone too. We all lost people to Venjix. That doesn't qualify you for-"
"But it does qualify you?!" She yelled.
"I have lost so many people in my life you can't even begin to imagine!" He yelled. "My life, you have no idea how my life has been. You have no idea of how much people I have lost. The pain, the heartbreak... you have no idea."
"We would if you ever talked to us," Chip commented, his eyes glued to the floor.
"Just go home. That's what I should have asked you to do from the start."
"You need us," Lauren insisted.
"I don't need you," he whispered and walked away from them, towards the other three.
When he reached them, Jen said: "You know? I went to war. I fought in a war for two years, against this alien race. Massive monsters, ridiculously advanced technology. And all I had was a team and an attack riffle, RJ."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"I didn't have my morpher when I went to war. That didn't make me any less of a soldier."
"They are not soldiers, Jen," he refuted. "They're kids."
"They are adult enough to know this is a war they want to fight," she told him. "Which is why I'm going to let them join us."
"You can't do that!"
"Yes, I can. This is my mission, I call the shots."
"You can't let them join us, what if they get hurt? What if they die?"
"Then we'll bury them."
She turned and began crossing the street to where Chip and Lauren were standing and RJ followed her. "This is a bad idea, you can't ask them to join us!"
"Why? Because you say so?"
"If it must be so, then yes!"
She stopped walking and looked at him, straight into his eyes. "You are not my boss, you are not my master and you are not my leader. You haven't given me a single reason to trust you since I met you, other than your weird New Age nonsense and your charming smirk. I am the leader of this mission and they will join us, whether you like it or not."
RJ stood there, stung by her words. "Not a single reason to trust me?"
"Not one. I'm tired of hearing half-truths and 'trust me, I have a plan's. Give me a reason to trust you, 'specially after what I just saw, and then I'll take your opinion into consideration. Until then, I call the shots and I say they can come with us."
Lauren and Chip picked their stuff up and walked towards Jen.
"This is a bad idea, Jen," he whispered.
"The only real danger I've seen we're all in is not Venjix, RJ," she put her index finger on his chest, accusatorily. "It's you. You and your secrets and your half-truths."
"They can't morph."
"Not until you fix their morphers. Billy and Bridge will take care of the lab. You will fix the morphers. Theirs and yours."
"There is nothing wrong with my morpher."
"Then fix whatever it is that is keeping you from morphing," she told him, leading Lauren and Chip towards Billy and Bridge. "And fix it fast. We don't know how long we have until Venjix is strong enough to strike again. We need to be prepared."