Ryjax teleported back into the Crystal Dimension, a little worse for wear. The Rangers and Chakku had interrupted him while he was trying to steal some more Morph-X. He'd been a little surprised by how quickly Ravi and Zoey had returned to action, up until Chakku had shown up.
"Damn that Captain Chakku!" He growled, slamming down a barrel, the only thing he'd managed to get away with. "I thought I lost him in my last dimensional jump!"
"Ryjax, you're back!" Blaze said in a sneer as he approached him. "You're looking a little frazzled."
"I thought I smelled something." Roxy giggled. "You're a little singed around the edges."
"That bloody Chakku's been a pain in my arse for years!" He snapped. "Now he's joined up with those Rangers of yours!"
"So, what you're saying is...you failed and you ran?" Blaze asked him. "I guess your hot streak had to finish sooner or later."
"Well, he's still on a HOT streak." Roxy chuckled, indicating the burns from the Rangers' blaster fire. "But I guess it's looking a little like your earlier success was beginner's luck?"
"I am no beginner!" Ryjax warned them. "Next time I face them..."
"Next time you face them, what do you really think will be different?" Blaze asked him. "You had your putties, your tyrannodrones and your viviks, and you still ended up, well, like this."
"I think you might need to pick things up a little." Roxy suggested. "Maybe you might need a little help?"
"I have all I need!" Ryjax told them. "Or, I will have! I just need to get something!"
With that, he teleported out. Blaze looked to Roxy and smiled.
"Perfect! I thought he'd never take the bait." Blaze stated.
"Oh, slave!" Roxy called out, at which Kendall appeared from behind a large crystal deposit. Roxy and Blaze teleported with her, following Ryjax's teleport signature. They found themselves in the woods outside of the city.
"Alright, there's his trail." Roxy said, pointing to some heavy footprints in the mud. "Slave, follow Ryjax, find out where his ship is, and wait for us to call."
"Oh, and...don't let him see you." Blaze added. Kendall rolled her eyes as she started to head down the tracks.
"Yeah, like that was high on my list of priorities." She grumbled, unable to do anything other than follow their commands. Roxy smiled as she watched Kendall heading down the trail.
"You know, having our own little Ranger puppet is very useful." Roxy commented. "Ryjax could probably read our energy signatures, but without her Energem, he can't track her."
"Better yet, worst case scenario if he does catch her, he crushes her and we lose nothing." Blaze added. "Come on. Let's get out of here."
With that, they teleported back to the Crystal Dimension.
At the Ranger base, Ben and Betty were with Chakku, carrying some of his things to a spare room. With Ryjax escaping, it looked like he was going to be there a little longer than they had expected, and so he had been assigned a room on the base.
"You pack pretty light." Ben commented, indicating one of his crates. Chakku just nodded.
"It's protocol. G5 Galaxy Police has strict rules against interfering with the natural order of other planets. They don't want to risk us leaving anything behind that's not meant to be here, so we're discouraged from bringing anything other than essential equipment." He explained as he followed them down the hall. "As for anything else we need, we're encouraged to engage in on-site procurement."
"So, you don't have anything from home in here?" Betty asked him. "No pictures? Potted plant?"
"Those are the kinds of things we're discouraged from bringing." He reiterated.
"Well, at least you'll have somewhere to rest up, maybe get out of that armour for a little while..."
"Actually much of it is hard-wired into my cybernetics. Only my helmet can be removed." He informed them.
"So...this is what you look like all the time?" Ben asked him. He just nodded.
"It's what I need for my duties." He responded. "It's for the greater good."
"Well, this is it." Ben said as they got to the room, opening it up. He went inside, putting his crate down on the desk, while Betty put hers on his bed. "We'll leave you to get unpacked. If you need anything to eat, the mess hall is down that way."
"I appreciate your hospitality." Chakku sighed. "But right now I would just like to get some rest."
With that, they both left the room. Ben looked to Betty as they walked down the hall.
"It's kind of sad, don't you think?" He asked.
"What is?" She asked.
"He's here, so far from home with nothing from his own planet. It just seems...sad." Ben commented.
"Yeah, a little." Betty agreed. "I'd like to know a bit more about his home. Maybe I'll get a chance to ask him. Apparently it's a lot less polluted than our planet."
"Well, if Commander Shaw gets her way you'll have all the time you need to ask." Ben responded. Betty just looked to him curiously. "I might have overheard her on the phone with dad earlier and...she's thinking of offering him a job here at Grid Battleforce."
"She is?" Betty asked him. "I mean, it would be great if he could work with us, but doesn't he have a job?"
"Once Ryjax is gone, maybe he'll be able to consider other options." Ben suggested as they headed into the lab. There, Nate was trying to work, while Zoey was doing some of her studies, with the emphasis being on 'trying'. There was a very excitable Steel there, singing Chakku's praises.
"And did you see that Enforcer Strike? It was AWESOME!" Steel regaled them, jumping around swinging his sword around wildly trying to recreate the scene. "He must have taken out like...a hundred putties!"
"It wasn't a hundred, it was maybe about six." Nate sighed. "It's impressive but..."
"And the best bit is...he's just like me!" He called out, throwing his arms out wildly, forcing Betty to duck or risk decapitation as his sword came her way. "He's part human, part machine!"
"Yeah, so we heard." Nate said, seeing Ben and Betty and almost looking relieved. "Oh, look, here's Ben and Betty, your night shift must be about to start!"
"Yeah, you can tell them all about Chakku!" Zoey added, carefully taking Steel's sword from him.
"Great idea!" Steel agreed as he grabbed Ben and Betty and headed out of the lab to report in for their shift. "Say, did you guys hear about how awesome Chakku is?"
As they left, Zoey put Steel's sword back on the weapons rack.
"Steel's really a fan of Chakku." She commented.
"Yeah, he is." Nate agreed. "I just wish he would talk about something else."
"You can kind of understand why he's so excited." Zoey continued, coming over towards Nate. "It's always nice to hear that there are people like you that you can look up to."
"But he just goes on..."
"Yes, and like I said, I know when I heard that some of the people I looked up to were Jewish it meant a lot to me." She told him, coming over and putting an arm around him. "It's not like there are too many people out there like Steel. It's understandable he's a little excited. And as far as role models go, Chakku is pretty impressive don't you think?"
"I guess that's all true." Nate agreed. "I'm going to get some ice-cream. Can I get you something?"
"Strawberry." She answered, kissing his cheek. Nate headed out of the lab, leaving Zoey to go back to her studies.
He walked down the hall, thinking about what Zoey had said. Strictly speaking Chakku's case wasn't exactly like Steel. Although they were both in essence cyborgs, Steel had been created as one from the beginning. He was effectively entirely machine with some human DNA as part of his central processing. Chakku on the other hand, as far as anyone knew, was born a human and CHOSE to become a cyborg.
However, he did have to think a bit about what Zoey had said. Growing up, Nate didn't have too many peers, or too many heroes, but he did look up to a few people who had come before him in science. His intellect had always separated him from others; he had been doing work at university when he was ten, and most of his peers were almost a decade his senior at very least. It didn't leave him with too many people like him but he did remember hearing about others who had exceptional intellects. Newton, Da Vinci, Tesla...people whose intellect had been so far beyond others of their time that they stood out as exceptional from a young age.
Steel didn't really have that, as far as he knew, until Chakku showed up, he was the only cyborg in existence. There had been moves into cybernetics in the world, but the science on Earth was still largely in its infancy. Even the work he'd done on Joanne's spine was still what could only really be described as being in the prototype stage, years, possibly even decades away from a full scale roll out.
He was about to get to the ice cream machine when he passed by a room, hearing Chakku's voice. He had left the door open and it sounded like he was talking to someone. He didn't pay it too much mind, but as he got closer, it sounded like the other voice was that of a child. There were, of course, Grid Battleforce personnel that had families, but none of those families lived on base. Those employees with families generally lived off-site with their family and commuted.
He couldn't help being drawn in to find out who this other voice was.
"My teachers say I'm really smart. They say I'm ready for the new class." The little girl said. Nate rounded the door, seeing a hologram being projected into the air. It was a young girl, maybe around seven or eight years old. Chakku was sitting on his bed listening to her.
"That's great, I'm so proud of you, Starlight." He told her. "You're getting so big now."
"Take off your helmet daddy." She told him. It surprised Nate a little to hear this. It made sense now why Chakku was talking with this girl, she was apparently his daughter, but he didn't know that Chakku had a family. He guessed that they had all been pretty busy and so no one had really had a chance to ask, but Chakku had never given any indication that he had a family.
"I'm sorry, Starlight." Chakku told her. "I'm still on official Galaxy Police business and regulations forbid us from removing our helmets."
"I understand." She sighed sadly. "It's for the greater good."
"That's right." Chakku assured her.
"I love you, daddy." She replied.
"I love you too, Starlight." He answered as he shut off the communication.
Nate paused for a moment, trying to process what he had heard. Commander Shaw had floated the idea of asking Chakku to join them once they defeated Ryjax. It was pretty clear he was a powerful and useful ally. It never occurred to them at the time that he might have commitments at home that would prevent him from accepting their offer if it was tempting enough. He was only roused as Zoey came up behind him.
"Nate?" She asked. "You were getting ice cream."
"Right...Ice cream." He replied, heading with her towards the vending machine.
Meanwhile, deep in the woods, Kendall was still following Ryjax at a safe distance. He was making his way through, following some kind of signal from a device on his wrist. She could only assume that he had some kind of security on his ship to prevent it being found by unwitting hikers.
By observation, Ryjax did not trust anyone. Given the fact she was following him on orders from Blaze and Roxy, it was hard to argue he didn't have a point, but given the value of his collection, it wasn't too hard to imagine why others would want to take it. At very least, much of his tech was incredibly rare pieces from some of the most vile creatures in the universe long since destroyed, and so would be worth quite a bit to those that collected such artefacts. However, with his reanimiser, she could only shudder to think of the potential nightmare if someone happened to be in possession of those artefacts.
They came to a clearing, in which there was a circle of standing stones. He approached them, looking them up and down with a sneer.
"Those statues may be ugly, but they make a great landmark!" He commented. As he headed off down a path, Kendall went to the circle. On closer inspection, they were not standing stones, but statues, depicting different dinosaurs. The palaeontologist in her was fascinated by the stones, which appeared to be incredibly ancient. Quite possibly they pre-dated homo-sapiens looking at them. She wished she had the time to study them more closely, but the collar's influence kicked in, forcing her to continue following Ryjax.
They made their way a little further through the forest, far from most of the walking paths, when he came to another clearing. This one was nowhere near as interesting as the statues, it was just a grassy field, but something about it just felt a little strange. She saw Ryjax standing, pressing some buttons on the device on his wrist, at which the air started to shimmer and shift. Before her eyes, his ship, the one she'd been held prisoner on for weeks appeared.
"A cloaking device, that makes sense." Kendall said to herself as she watched him go to the door. He did something, she couldn't see what, but it didn't take a genius to figure out he had some kind of security on his ship. The door opened and he disappeared inside.
Kendall moved into a better position, finding herself some rocks to hide in, and kept a careful watch.
Inside the ship, Ryjax headed to his vault, opening it up.
"Bloody Chakku, you've been a pain in my arse far too long." Ryjax grumbled as he started looking through his collection. "The chase was fun, but that battle with the Rangers was a little too close for comfort. It's time to bring in some big guns."
He was searching through for inspiration, trying to figure out what he wanted to use. As a collector, he was loathe to give up any of his prized collection. Much of what he had amassed was one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable!
He had a lot of artefacts that could summon incredibly powerful warriors thanks to his reanimiser, but doing so would cost him valuable collectibles. He wanted to be rid of Chakku and the Rangers, to leave the way clear for him to raid the Rangers' vault and make his collection by far the most valuable in the entire multiverse, but he didn't know what he was willing to part with.
He started looking through other weapons when his eyes came to rest on a device, one he'd found on a planet long ago.
"This, now this might be just the ticket!" He said, opening the security case and lifting the device out, inspecting it. "With this little beauty, Chakku and the Rangers are going to have some really big problems!"