Chapter 2- Beyond the Blue Horizon.

Standard Disclaimer- I don't own the Power Rangers. I do believe I have taken off on my own timeline… I missed every thing from when Billy left up until the 3rd episode of DT. I am trying to do research on what happened, but it is a HUGE task. I am just doing my best to keep things in order.

Please R/R. The reviews keep me motivated.

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Celeste was cold. She didn't like the big glass jar that the scary lady had put her in. Anxiously she looked a the lid, in fear of a giant cotton ball soaked in nail-polish remover. Mommy's step brothers in Dallas liked to kill bugs in jars.

Curious about her surroundings, she wondered if she was in space. Daddy had gone to space and never came back. Mommy still cried for him, though she didn't want Celeste to know. Would Mommy cry for her? Would Uncle Tommy cry for her? She could bet that Chelsea wouldn't. Chelsea was mean… called her a baby and a freak, just cause Celeste knew more than her dumb old aunt.

The scary lady came back into the bright room beyond the glass jar. She still guarded the finger that Celeste had sunk her teeth into. But this time, the scary lady wasn't alone. She came with the man in black armor like the black beetle she was watching in Uncle Tommy's yard earlier this morning. -Celeste had been mad because Uncle Tommy had taken away the magnifying glass- not like she was going to burn ants… not her, no way! She liked ants!

Beetle- man had been there with the scary lady this morning. After the lady had grabbed hold of Celeste, the beetle man had fought Uncle Tommy… she didn't know what happened to him… but she thought for sure he was dead. He would never let some one take her.

They were talking about her! She could see them looking at her and discussing her! Celeste decided that when she got out of the jar, she would bite the other hand of the scary lady and kick the beetle man!

Just then another monster walked in. He had the face of a lizard… an really ugly lizard…No! A dinosaur. He had the face of a ugly dinosaur! The other two bad guys stopped and turned to him.

The dinosaur face walked up to the jar and peered in at her. Celeste closed her eyes. She could hear muffled words through the glass. He was talking about destruction of the Power Rangers and some pro-is-see. She didn't know what a pro-is-see was, but it sounded bad.

Suddenly the lid was lifted from the jar. The cruel hands of Beetle-man snatched her from the bottom before she could slip out of his grasp. He flipped her out of the jar and tucked her under his big, hot arm. The petite child tried to wiggle away, but he held too tight. He brought her close his boss, who inspected her closely.

"Throw her in with the other prisoner… the new one," spoke the dinosaur at last, "Don't hurt her… she will be very useful."

Celeste could smell his breath as he spat out those words. His breath smelled like icky coffee and loads of garlic. The combinations made Celeste's tummy feel funny. She had been hungry until that moment, but not anymore.

"Be careful, it BITES." snapped the scary lady as Beetle-man carried her out of the room under his arm.

He carried her down a long hall and then down a long flight of stairs. Celeste tried to count the stairs, but she could only count to 25... She guessed there were about 5 more after that. She had never seen such a flight of stairs! The stairs branched off into a hall. Turning slightly to the left, Beetle-man stopped at a big metal door with a little barred window. Celeste didn't see it until after he lead her into the room, as Beetle-man carried her with his face behind him.

"There! Stay out of trouble" he growled, dumping her on the floor. With the slam of a door, he was gone.

The room was cool and a mist hung over the cool cement floor. There was an inch tall slit at the very top of the room. Water and a faint slice of light dripped into the room. There was dirt streaked on the wall where it had hitchhiked on drops of water past the short fat bars guarding the gash.. The walls were fortified with more cement preventing an ambitious prisoner from digging out.

Celeste made a beeline for the far right corner of the room, under the little vent window. She didn't know what these bad people wanted with her, but it couldn't be good. She wanted Mommy or Uncle Tommy! At this point, she would even be happy to see Chelsea! She curled up in a little ball and cried herself to sleep.

********

"You married the Original Blue Ranger?" Ethan asked in awe. He had settled on the couch with the other two rangers, instead had made himself at home on the raised hearth of the false fireplace, which coincidently held the TV.

"Bill and I met as a result of the investigation. He had been living on another planet, Aquitar for several years, One night…" as she explained, the scene played over in her head:

~~~~~~

She chided herself as she trudged up to the research site. She had no idea why she had let this enigma wrestle her from her sleep… "Go to the Command Center, Kara… my husband needs you…" the dream had said. Kara had argued, claiming she was only a biologist and everything on site was advanced enough technology to baffle a government specialist. Her dream had argued… "No, he needs YOU. No one else but YOU can help him."

"Great, Kara, you let an alien dream stalker wrestle you from your bed… real smart." she said out loud to herself as she came up on the ruble of what had been great cement cylinders that comprised the research site.

Twenty year old Kara Johansson was the youngest member of the government research team investigating the "mysterious phenomenon" that was the Power Rangers. Her masters of Zoology and an innate knack for anatomy and taxonomy had made her appealing to the government, and so she was recruited and shipped off to the desert near Angle Grove, California.

Really it wasn't so bad. She had not been in the field that much. She had been mainly chained up in a lab near the site, dissecting an alien being that had crashed near the site. Her specimen had been male, yet, it was a female of the same species that had haunted her dreams for two months, beginning just before the investigation. After coining the phrase and eventual name of the specimen, "Homo-Aquaterius," Kara had turned her attention, two days ago, to the information in the abandoned base's computers, or really, what was left of them. Matt had been eager to show the information in one of the databases from one of the few computers he had figured out.

The former base of the Power Rangers hummed silently as she entered. This was the first time this had happened, as an apparent explosion had once ripped through it. Most of the underground chambers were intact, though severely damaged. Though it was mostly dark, the instrument panel danced with light. It had seemingly come alive.

"Matt?" she called out, hoping the team computer expert was working late. There was no reply.

"Aw, geeze. First you allow a dream to drag your butt up here, But NOW you're the lucky person who gets to discover the security breach." she said out-loud to herself

It was then that she noticed the video screen had been turned on, something Matt had been desperately trying to figure out for weeks. She cursed not-so- under her breath.

"Tsk, tsk" came a male voice from the screen.

Kara whirled around to end up "face to face" with an incredible set of blue-ish gray-ish, human, eyes staring back from the video screen.

"Uh, listen… uh… you can hear me?" she stammered.

"I can see you, too. Nice Pajamas." he teased lightly.

Kara turned red and tried to cover her self… her black satin tank set was pretty, but a little more than she wanted a complete stranger to see.

"Um, I don't know how you accessed this screen, but really, you need to forget you ever connected to it. This is a government research site and you could be subject to federal prosecution."

"Really." he said, as if he didn't care. "Have any problems accessing the equipment?"

"I wouldn't even know how to turn on the lights."

"Biologist?"

"How did you know?"

"Lucky guess. What is a Biologist doing in the Power Chamber in the middle of the night?"

"I was going to ask you the same question."

"You first."

"You are soooo going to be prosecuted if you don't get off of this screen." she said, walking up to the control panel that Matt presumed controlled the video screen. She was hoping to find a switch or something… but there were so many buttons, slides and toggle switches she didn't know where to begin.

"Fine… I had a dream that I was supposed to come here and help some one." she huffed as she investigated the panel.

"Move to your left, under the counter there is a switch, flip it." Looking at the man like he was a escaped lunatic, she followed his instructions. Immediately the overhead lights flipped on.

"How did you know that?"

"Elementary."

"Alright, Sherlock Holmes… Answers" It was late, she didn't want to be fooled with.

"Momentarily. Right now, I want you to move your hands to the right… See the green button with the three toggles underneath it and the knob with the red light?"

"Uh, yeah, kinda hard to miss the big blinking button." she noted sarcastically.

"Trip the toggles, turn the knob, smash the button and stand back" he said quickly, looking over his shoulder.

"Ooo-Kay"

Doing what the strange, yet intoxicatingly handsome man asked, she stood back. A flash of white light filled the room and suddenly he was no longer behind the video screen. He was standing right before her!

"Uh, Thanks! You just saved my life… The Aquitinian death squad was after me."

Suddenly alarmed Kara asked, "What for?"

"Right-wing Purists Aquitinians were using me to demonstrate their new anti-peace trust. Aquitar is in political upheaval and the Purists were apposed to my marriage to one of their own." He explained

"And what about your wife--You didn't just leave her, did you?"

"No, Cestria was killed two years ago, at the beginning of the Civil War. I'm Billy Cranston." he said extending his hand.

"Kariss Johansson, call me Kara. So, then Mr. Universal Traveler, how did you know about this place?"

"Uh, well.." he floundered, debating on revealing his past, "Uh, I used to work in the Power Chamber…I helped set up these computers. "

"You were a Ranger?"

"Confidentially, yes, for a while I was… but that was before this system was set up…"

"What happened here? This place is a mess…what do the rangers use now? And the Aquitarians… we have a specimine, he crashed…" she began to barrage him with questions.

"Cestro. Yes, I sent him back to aide in the teleportation. I couldn't access it from Aquitar. I suspected something had happened… I just didn't imagine he made it this far. I kinda figured something happened to him as he tried to leave Aquitar. I don't know what happened here, I only knew that scans from the Aquitinian base showed the Power Chamber had enough power to transport me home."

Billy went on to explain a few things for the base, but Kara wasn't listening very closely. She was lost in thought of the dream that brought her here… Cestria, her enigma had a name, and it had been Billy she wanted Kara to save…

~~~

"So, anyway, Bill joined our team, under the cover of a computer wiz friend who had been abroad. We told everyone that my brother introduced us… that, incidentally, is how I discovered the truth about my brothers past. No one ever suspected that Bill had been a ranger. We were married about a year later.

"Four years ago, Dr. Rita Runyon took over the investigation after becoming head of the paleontology dept. at UC-Angle Grove…"

"But she's at UC Reefside…" Ethan interjected.

"Now she is, she wasn't then. Anyway, she was one of the group that mysteriously came back from Terra Venture and said there had been an increase in galaxian evil. Everyone thought The Countdown but an end to it, but something had been amassing deep in space… She put up a huge amount of funding to send a team to the other side of the moon, citing something about a evil base. When she called here, I couldn't go and Bill refused. He didn't want to miss the birth of our baby. He was also working with Tommy on some top-secret project…" with those words she gave a annoyed look to Hayley.

"Kara- they just didn't want you to worry…" Hayley tried to explain.

"Anyway, in the end, we all talked Bill into it. It was the opportunity of a life time and he would be back just in time for my due date. He went, reluctantly. Celeste decided to come a week early, so by some trick of fate, we managed a satellite link up with the hospital, and Bill got to watch the birth. With in days, the left the moon, headed for home and were never heard from again. NASA waited, at my insistence that the mission not be called a total loss until all their supplies would have run out. Then they gave me a little flag all folded in a box and gave him some medals… Angel Grove even named their new science wing after him. They just gave up on him"

"But you don't think that he is dead, do you?" Kira asked.

"No. Until there is a body, Bill is still alive." Kara spoke the phrase with such indignation you believed her, but the tears spilling out of her hazel eyes gave away the fear that she tried to hide at all cost.

"Kara, the top secret project that Tommy and Bill were working on when Bill left… Bill kept all of the information in his computer. I think it has something to do with why Tommy was beat up and Celeste taken." Hayley spoke up.

"What were they working on?" Kara asked, very slowly, deliberately and very forcefully.

"Gathering data on a rumored prophesy that Bill heard while on Aquitar… a prophesy dealing with the eldest heir of the Power Rangers. I don't know a whole lot, it was back just after you introduced me and Tommy… I wasn't in his inner circle. He has mentioned it several times since then."

"And just was this going to be mentioned to me?"

"He really hoped he would never have to tell you."

"Ugh! I am going to kill him when he gets out of that hospital!"

"You do that… right now, I need to know if you still have Bill's computer's around here."

Kara pointed to the wall opposite the couch. There, all along the wall and part of the two adjacent walls, was a long c shaped computer work station. On either of the shorter sides, computer's were set up. Each had an identical work chair, but only one (at the computer on the left) looked used. In the middle of the long branch, there was one common printer/scanner combo. The computer that Kara indicated was Bill's was to the right and much older than her brand new one. Ethan made a bee line for the computer chair.

"All right," he said, "Now we can get somewhere.