Sorry doesn't cut it. I know. But consider this my Christmas present to you guys. I'll try to add another update to this story within the month.

Troy's POV

I would be lying if I said that I was not feeling even a bit jealous.

I knew that Chase and Gia were just childhood friends and all, but I had to admit- that Chase guy was pretty damn good-looking. I'm not saying Gia was one of the swooning kind, but he was enough to make even the most resilient fall at his feet.

Yes. He was that hot.

For some reason, an old image popped into my mind. I remembered the first time I had seen Gia. I'd slipped and landed with my jaw literally on the ground. Man, had that hurt. And then the Hispanic dude with his warning/advice about hot girls. Gia wasn't less either.

I tried to concentrate on what her bespectacled cousin, Kendall, was saying. I'd vaguely realized that these guys had something to do with dinosaurs, which seemed kind of duh to me, seeing as they worked at a dinosaur museum with a dinosaur (mostly triceratops) café that served dinosaur fries and dinosaur smoothies. So, what was the big deal?

"…Troy?" Noah's exasperated cut through my musings like the shark he symbolized. When I focused on him, his spectacles rested crookedly on his nose, and his face had turned a shade paler, his expression not as stern as it usually was.

"Huh?" I realized, somewhere at the back of my mind, that I was sounding incredibly dumb, and not at all like the leader I was supposed to act like. Especially since Gia wasn't there to slap some sense into me. To be fair, she was the one I was, well, daydreaming about. Alongside dinosaurs and dinosaur-themed junk food.

Emma rolled her eyes at my response. "I told you he wasn't paying attention."

"I am paying attention." I tried to sit up straighter, as if that might make me look more alert.

Five pairs of narrowed eyes looked at me suspiciously. A blond boy wearing a green shirt had joined us at the table at some point of time; I really hadn't noticed.

Said guy cocked an eyebrow. "And who am I, then?"

I opened my mouth, and then having thought of nothing in particular to say, closed it. It reminded me of an impression of a fish.

He smiled, like, there you go. I couldn't help but roll my eyes at this immature or maybe not so immature response.

Kendall sighed and placed her elbows on the table and smoothed back her already smooth hair. "We get it, Riley. And Troy, I really expected a team leader to listen to a discussion like this."

I shrugged, looking at the table's gray top as I felt my face burn at being reprimanded by someone not that far from my age. Then my head shot up as realization dawned upon me. "What do you mean, as team leader?"

Emma frowned. "In case you haven't caught the drift yet, Troy, these two know that we're rangers."

My eyebrows shot up, followed shortly by my formerly lethargic (to say the least) posture. "Why do they know? Who told them? And again, in case you hadn't caught the drift yet, why?"

Jake scowled at me. "Well, aren't you attentive."

I resisted the urge to smack the idiotic green/black Snakehead in the face. Sadly, I managed to control myself, and raised an eyebrow at Noah for an explanation. He had been looking at me expectantly, and was satisfied when I spied him, and began to explain.

"As you obviously have not noticed, that in any way, anyone can be a ranger. We, as satisfactorily normal everyday teens you could find at the nearest high school, managed to quench Gosei's hunt for capable homo sapiens, were assigned our respective tasks in the form of our similarly assigned color. Not in a seemingly different way, the blonds (as Gia is currently not at the table) you see seated at this table have been assigned apparently not very different tasks than ours, probably by a varying mentor, as a part of another team of defenders."

He smiled at me with the air of a person who was trying to make a child understand a somewhat average concept, complicating it tenfold in the process, and obviously not realizing the look of confusion on the child's face, and taking great pride in having the capability to do so.

I looked at Emma helplessly.

She rolled her eyes yet again. "These. Guys. Are. Rangers. Too."

I smiled triumphantly at her ability to explain something in such few words, before the meaning of the said words hit me and that smile was wiped off my face with Gia-like effectiveness. "What?"

Jake a.k.a. Snakehead sat back in his chair. "You heard her."

I got up so fast that my chair fell to the floor with an ear-splitting THWACK and I narrowly avoided disgracing myself by tripping over my fallen comrade, and face-planting on the squeaky-clean tiles.

Kendall winced as if my stupidity hurt, which, needless to say, did not help my dwindling self-esteem. Teenage issues.

I wheeled around and looked at the assembled party with dramatically wide eyes. "Why didn't you tell me before? Does Gia know?"

Emma frowned. "Gia knows, Troy."

Noah looked at me, a little confused. "And we did tell you. You were daydreaming."

Again with the confidence-hurting comments. Ignoring his crude behavior, I generously decided to concentrate on my team's pink ranger's words. "How the hell does she know?"

Riley's eyes sparkled with amusement. "It's obvious, Red."

I cocked an eyebrow at him, the way he had done a few moments before, to me. "How?"

"Chase is our Black Dino Charge Ranger."

Thank you, guys! Hope you like it! R n R!