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Feedback: Much appreciated.
AN: I thought about making this longer, but I decided that it would be better to just introduce Zordon and Alpha here and focus on the Tributes' reactions to being chosen in the next one; hope you like the results.
Twice Chosen
Leaping out from around the corner to look at the source of that voice, I was sure that I wasn't the only one of our strange group to be confused at what we had just found. The figure that had grabbed Rue was barely as tall as Rue herself, with a squat body and long arms that put me in mind of the monkeys I'd seen in some of Prim's old nature books. However, until a monkey, this creature's body was made of red and grey metal, with its belly reminding me of the chain mail that some past tributes had used to protect themselves once ordered by suitable supporters. The most significant difference, however, was its large wide head, which was shaped like a thick silver disc that had two glowing yellow eyes on either side, along with what looked like a large crystal globe in the centre of its head.
Letting out a defiant yell, Thresh charged towards the creature with his blade raised, only for the thing to extend one of its arms and literally throw Thresh over itself like he weighed nothing. As Thresh flew down the corridor this thing had just emerged from, I took up a position standing defensively over Rue as Peeta, Foxface and Glimmer gathered behind me, Glimmer and I holding our weapons while Peeta and Foxface just tried to back us up.
"We will kill you," I said, trying to sound dramatic.
"Kill me?" the strange creature said with a certain light scepticism in its voice. "How?"
"There's six of us," Glimmer said, raising an arrow that even I knew wasn't likely to work on whatever this thing was.
"Six?" the robot repeated, looking over the five of us curiously before turning to the corridor where it had thrown Thresh, its head moving with a speed that made me think of surprise. "Six of you? But that's- Rita had hers on her when- ah, right; the little one's just a tag-along."
"…Tag-along?" Rue repeated, looking at the small thing in confusion.
"Look, never mind about us; what are you?" Foxface asked, waving her hand at the thing in confusion.
"I'm Alpha Five," the robot replied, looking back to see Thresh had gotten back to his feet. "Ah, good, you're up; feel free to stick with the others, just don't attack me again, could you?"
"What's an… Alpha Five?" Rue asked, as Thresh moved to cautiously join the rest of us.
"An alphormic lorcaid persona android."
"…That mean anything to you?" Thresh glanced at Foxface, clearly still a bit bitter about being thrown aside like that.
"I think I understood about half of those words, and I'm not entirely sure the other half even are words," Foxface clarified.
"Hold on; if you're Alpha Five, what happened to Alphas One through Four?" Glimmer added with a slight grin.
"Lost, destroyed, dismantled and replaced due to the need for an upgrade," the robot replied with a brief shrug before it spread its arms and seemed to be grinning at us. "But look at you all! Different colours, different kids… You're all so young-looking! I've been waiting for this for so long-!"
"Waiting?" I cut in, already uncertain what kind of answer I wanted to hear. "How… long have you been waiting?"
"What's the day?"
"…Monday?" Peeta said uncertainly, after a brief count on his fingers to confirm the date.
"Then… sixty-five million years," 'Alpha' replied.
I was relieved to see that the others looked just as shocked at that revelation as I was. The notion of a talking machine was enough of a stretch, but the idea that this thing had been around that long…
"How… how the Hell are you that old?" Glimmer asked, looking like she would have dropped her weapons if she had been less controlled. "But… were we even-?"
"You're alien, aren't you?" Foxface looked at Alpha with a tentative smile.
"Alien?" Peeta, Rue and I looked at the girl from Five in surprise.
"As in not from this planet," the other girl said, her smile broadening as she looked at the small robot and took the blue thing out of her pocket. "This ship… you're from another world, right? And so are these?"
"Bingo," Alpha 'nodded' at us before he cocked his head. "You're all so young looking… oh, that reminds me, I disabled those trackers in your arms when you entered the ship; hope I didn't do anything culturally insensitive, but-"
"Trackers?" all six of us yelled.
"Our trackers?" Glimmer looked at her forearm, in the same place where I had been injected with my own tracker on the way to the arena. "You shut them down?"
"Uh… yeah?" Alpha said uncertainly. "I apologise if that's breaking some kind of cultural rule I don't know about, but part of the rules are that nobody else can know what you are-"
"OK, let's just back up and talk about this for a few moments, right?" Foxface said urgently, her eyes flickering from Alpha to the rest of us as though trying to work out what she should take in next. "If you just shut the trackers down when we got inside, what about how long it took us to get down here? Could someone have detected us going into this cave in the first place?"
"Based on what I've detected about those trackers, as soon as you entered the pool, they wouldn't have been strong enough to transmit a signal," the robot explained. "Whoever was tracking you might have been aware that you were in this area, but the rocks would have at least hindered the signal until you met me, and I can confirm that I shut them down as soon as you got inside."
"Right…" Foxface nodded tentatively. "So… the trackers would have probably stopped telling anyone else where we were once we got into the caves… and now there's literally no way anyone else can know where we are?"
"No," Alpha said.
"In other words… everyone up there thinks we're dead?" Peeta asked.
"Probably assume we set off some kind of cave-in-" Thresh smirked.
"What the Hell?" Glimmer looked indignantly at Alpha. "You mean everyone up there thinks we died offscreen?"
"Offscreen?" I repeated, looking at Glimmer incredulously. I knew that Careers were more focused on the Games than other Districts, but the idea that she was that focused on it…
"Seriously?" Foxface studied Glimmer with an expression that matched my own. "We just discovered that aliens are real and you're still worried about the Games?"
"Hey, I'm a Career; we don't die 'offscreen'!" Glimmer protested. "We go out in a big dramatic showdown with our fellows, or at the very least we get taken down by someone who knows what they're doing; they seriously think I died in a cave?"
"…You get that you're not actually dead, One, right?" Thresh pointed out.
"That's not the point-!"
"No, the point is that… Alpha… hasn't been waiting around here for millions of years just for the sake of it," I interrupted, looking curiously at the strange robot. As much as I was suddenly worried about what my mother and Prim must be going through thinking that I was dead, we could focus on the implications of this twist in the Games once we'd established what was going on here. "So what did you bring us here for?"
"Turn around," Alpha said solemnly. I wasn't sure what to expect when I followed his suggestion, but was shocked to find that what had been the main chamber had suddenly become a larger enclosed area with five circular panels arranged around a strange glowing golden… thing in the centre of the room. The wall opposite the entrance had a strange pattern on it that vaguely reminded me of the chain mail I'd seen some Tributes receive as particularly expensive gifts, but as we approached the panels around the glowing thing in the middle, I could swear that they were starting to glow, as though somehow responding to our presence.
"So what do we do here?" Peeta asked, keeping his voice low as Alpha seemed to be examining something around each panel.
"Hit it and run the first chance we get," Thresh said grimly.
"…Shouldn't hurt, but let's see…" Alpha muttered, studying the glowing panels before he looked back at us. "OK, please step into the footprints- except for the tag-along, obviously."
"That's me, right?" Rue asked.
"Her name is Rue," Thresh and I said simultaneously.
"Right, sorry; as you can imagine, my people skills are… well, I haven't had much practice," Alpha 'shrugged', before he indicated the panels. "Anyway, if you could?"
I wasn't entirely surprised to find Peeta walking up to one of the panels himself; even if he was as aware of the possible consequences as I was, anything that got him out of the Games would be good news. He tentatively placed one foot on the panel only to pull back when his movement triggered a brief burst of yellow light in the same apparent colour as the object he'd found. Once the rest of us were sure that nothing else was going to happen, Glimmer, Thresh, Foxface and I moved around to the other panels, while Rue waited uncertainly beside Alpha.
On one level, I wasn't sure why I was going along with this, but at the same time, it seemed like such a small request, and Alpha had already passed up a chance to do any serious to Thresh even when he'd deliberately attacked the robot. Looking around, I saw Peeta and Foxface move to stand on the platforms, while Thresh and Glimmer took a moment to assess their panels before following their example. Taking a deep breath, I stepped onto the panel, and suddenly the wall behind us seemed to ripple as though it was a river standing on its side and someone had thrown a rock into it.
"It works!" Alpha yelled, running around the panels to stand near the wall as the rest of the room started to shake. "This is great; it's working! Zordon? Are you there, Zordon?"
I didn't even need to ask who or what Alpha was talking to, as I saw a face appear from the middle of the wall. It was hard to be certain, but from what I could tell the face looked like it was intended to represent a human, or at least something close enough to human that there weren't any obvious differences. The face and Alpha spoke in an unfamiliar language as the face seemed to be trying to look around itself, leaving the five of us to get off the panels and move back towards Rue. The face sounded slightly panicked, which didn't make me feel any better about the situation, but as far as I could tell Alpha was trying to reassure the face about something…
With the ship shaking around us, I decided that this wasn't the time to question that particular detail; we'd done whatever the robot had wanted us to do, so the priority now was to get away. Once again unaware that I had taken the lead until it had already started, I hurried towards the door to the room, only for it to slam shut before we could get out.
"Crap," Foxface muttered.
"Think we could-?" Thresh began as he raised his fists.
"Come forward, please!" Alpha's voice suddenly called over to us. Turning around, I saw the small robot was still standing in front of the now-still head, which appeared to be waiting at the other end of the room with a vaguely curious expression on its face.
"Do we have a choice?" Rue asked tentatively.
"I have a feeling he wouldn't have shut that door if we could just bash it down with… whatever new strength we just picked up, so I'm going to say we don't," Glimmer put in, before she looked over at me. "Shall we?"
"…Might as well," I nodded, walking cautiously forward as Alpha turned back to speak briefly with the face about something else.
"Look!" the little robot said, eagerly looking back at us. "It's Zordon!"
"And… who's 'Zordon'?" Foxface asked, even as she joined us in walking cautiously towards the other end of the room.
"Zordon… they don't know who you are," I vaguely heard Alpha say in a low voice before he turned back to us. "Come in, come in!"
"These are them?" the face that was apparently Zordon said, now speaking an intelligible language in a deep voice as it studied us. "They are so small… and six?"
"Yeah, the littlest one's basically a tag-along; I think she was just there when the other five found the coins," Alpha shrugged.
"Hey!" Rue glared indignantly at Alpha even as I suddenly realised she had taken my hand.
"We're not leaving her," I spoke up, surprising myself as I looked at the face. "Rue's staying with us."
"I see," the apparent 'Zordon' said, before he seemed to 'turn' to face Alpha. "You mean to tell me that the fate of the universe has been placed in the hands of these children?"
"The universe?" Foxface and Peeta yelled incredulously.
"Hold on; we're- you want us to save the universe?" Glimmer looked at the face in shock, waving her bow for emphasis. "What are- how did we get that job?"
"They're teenagers," Alpha explained as though that justified our reactions. "I ran a check; it's basically somewhere between infancy and full maturity."
"…Show me the coins," the face said, looking solemnly at us. Feeling almost obliged to respond, I took out the red 'coin' (this was no currency I'd ever seen before, but it looked kind of coin-like) and held it up, glancing around to see that the other four with coins were doing the same.
"The Morphing Grid is never wrong," Zordon said, a slight edge to his tone that I couldn't quite understand. "If the power coins have returned to the ship with these…"
"Teenager!" Alpha called out.
"With these teenagers," Zordon finished, "than these teenagers are the Power Rangers."
The solemn nature of those words was enough to halt my initial suspicion.
I didn't know what this situation had to do with us, but I was becoming increasingly sure that nothing here had anything to do with the Games.
I just had no idea if that was a good thing, a bad thing, or something else altogether…