Legal: I do not own Power Rangers or the associated names, places, characters, events etc. Anything not covered by the above rights should be considered purely the creation of the author.

Rating: T – may be some adult themes, including language and violence.

Riley was getting dressed for a run. Thanks to Heckyl's recent attack on the restaurant, they all had a couple of very welcome days off while the cafe was being fixed up. They were all spending the time in their own way. The fact that it fell on a weekend, giving the whole team an all too rare weekend off was just a bonus.

Riley looked to where Ivan and Chase were playing videogames and just shook his head in disbelief, laughing a little.

"Egad! I've been killed again?" Ivan yelled, gesturing wildly to the screen. "These scoundrels are indeed Dark Souls! They interrupted my quest again!"

"They're trolls Ivan." Chase explained to him. "It happens all the time in on-line gaming."

"They don't even fight with any skill! They simply tumble into me repeatedly with Armour of Thorns!" He complained as he went to re-start his game. "Why they can't simply join us on a quest instead of attacking in this unfuriating..."

"They're trolls!" Chase reiterated.

"I don't see what their species..."

"He means they're people who go into other's games just to screw with them and piss them off." Riley told him. "I can't believe you guys are going to spend all day in here playing video games anyway. It's an amazing day outside! Why don't you get out and do some training?"

"Riley, we've been over this. You relax your way, and I relax mine." Chase told him, throwing a cashew nut into the air, catching it in his mouth.

"I on the other hand am finding this simulation to be most compelling." Ivan declared. "Even if it IS most irritating when other people show up to ruin my quest. Get away from that pick-up you varlet! I vanquished the guard! Oh, running away are you! Taste my steel!"

Tyler showed up, beginning to get his stuff together. Riley gestured to him.

"See, Tyler agrees with me, don't you?" Riley answered. "It's far too nice to sit inside..."

"Actually, I'm going up to the local mines." Tyler told them.

"The mines?" Chase asked, turning around in his seat. "You get a weekend off for the first time in weeks, and you want to go to some mines?"

"This is indeed curious." Ivan agreed, his curiosity piqued by this. "At least when I go to mines it is to gain...Oh don't you dare take those gems you...you TROLL!"

"You might want to be careful with language like that around Leanne." Riley reminded them. "Her uncle IS half-troll."

They heard a noise from out in the hall and stopped in their tracks.

"What was that?" Riley asked. They headed out into the hall, finding Kendall and Shelby struggling with some boxes as they headed for Kendall's apartment.

"Whoa, what's all this?" Chase asked.

"This would be called moving!" Shelby told them. "Ms Morgan kindly agreed to let me move in!"

"Move in?" Tyler asked her. "You're moving in there?"

"I don't recall you ever extending such an invite to any of us." Ivan said as he stood with his hands on his hips.

"Shelby and her father could use a little space from each other, and I was willing to help out." Kendall told them. "Speaking of helping out, since you all seem to be at a loose end..."

"Actually...I was about to go for a run." Riley said, heading down the hall. "But these guys were just playing video games! I'm sure they'd be only too happy to help!"

"Actually, I've got someone I need to see over at the mines." Tyler told them, bringing out the letter. "This was left on my jeep."

"Rusty Galloway?" Shelby said as she read it. "I knew he knew more than he was letting on!"

"He said he wants to talk to me." Tyler said as he gestured to the letter. "I think he might know something about my dad! He's working up at the local mines doing a land survey."

"You're going up there to see him now?" Shelby asked him. Tyler took the letter back.

"It says he wants to see me today." Tyler stated. "I don't know how long he's going to be working in the city. I have to see him today."

"Tyler, when I spoke to Rusty, he wasn't exactly very forthcoming. In fact, he really didn't have much good to say about your dad at all." Shelby said, remembering her somewhat less than friendly conversation with the man after the lecture she had gate-crashed with Erin. "It also said he was the last to see your dad. I think you should prepare yourself for the fact that what he has to say...might not be what you want to hear."

"So you're saying I should give up?" Tyler snapped at her. "You're saying that now that I've finally got someone who has something to say..."

"I just want you to be ready for the fact that whatever he says might not be good news." Shelby told him. Tyler gave her a look that could kill, before storming away. "Tyler, please...Tyler!"

"I understand you mean well, but perhaps it might be for the best for Tyler to hear him out, even if it isn't good news." Ivan told her. Just then, there was a noise further down the hall, and they turned to see a girl struggling up the stairs with a couple of boxes.

"Whoa, when you asked me to help you move, I didn't know you had this many books Shelbster." Erin complained. Ivan was quickly down the hall, and grabbed a couple of the boxes off her.

"Here, allow me to be of assistance." He said, helping her. Erin smiled as she saw him.

"Wow, um...thanks." She stated.

"It is my pleasure my good lady." Ivan said as he took the boxes and went up the hall. She came up to Shelby and pulled the Pink Ranger in. "Who is your friend?"

"What?" Shelby asked, continuing to look down where Tyler had gone. "Oh, um...that's Ivan."

"Maybe helping you out won't be such a wash out after all." Erin said as she adjusted her grip on the box she was still carrying.

Meanwhile, over on the ship, Fury was in the medical bay, strapped into one of the machines when he heard someone coming in. Strapped to the table as he was, he struggled to see as the door opened, but eventually the new arrivals came in. Snide and Wrench brought a creature that Fury had never seen before into the medical bay, coming around into view.

"What's going on?" Fury asked. "Who is this?"

"Check on our new ally, I want to ensure he's at 100% when he faces the Rangers!" Snide instructed Wrench.

"Oh, believe me, I'm perfectly fine. I have a headache, but that's to be expected." Singe stated stroking his forehead.

"Wrench, can you give him something for that?" Snide asked him.

"I doubt he could do anything that would make a difference." Singe stated. "My biology is best suited to significantly warmer climates with much higher pressures. My kind normally resides in a planet's mantle. When we venture above ground, the reduced pressure..."

"The pressure inside your head pushing out increases." Wrench surmised.

"Quite." Singe told them. "The systems in my asteroid counteract that, but on the planet's surface, I just have to grin and bear it for the most part."

"Who is this?" Fury demanded again, struggling to get out of his bench. Singe looked to him and gave him a knowing smirk.

"Why, I've heard of this one, I believe you used to be Sledge's partner, the infamous Fury. I'm right aren't I?" He asked. "My my, someone does appear to have had a rough time of things."

Fury was in the medical bay recovering from his wounds at the hands of the Aqua Ranger. He had been attacked while he was fleeing a Ranger battle, and already injured. In his fury, the Aqua Ranger had all but finished him off. It was only his good luck that the Aqua Ranger had broken off the battle to help the other Rangers that allowed him to escape with his life. Now though, it was Wrench's technology that was keeping him alive, allowing him to heal wounds that by all rights should leave him an invalid were they left to their natural state.

"You know me, so you know..."

"I know that you've been on Earth for millions of years and you haven't managed to secure a single Energem." Singe teased him. "Don't worry; I'm sure you'll get your chance to get your own back on the mean children who beat you up."

"Why you..."

"Fury, you need to settle down!" Wrench told him, making some adjustments. "You need to be still if the machines are going to do their work properly!"

"Yes, you just rest up. Let the real warriors take care of the tough battles." Singe taunted him. He looked to Snide. "Now, can I get somewhere private to recover from my journey? I just want to rest up for a couple of hours or so.

"Take any cell you want." Snide told him. "Then get out there and show me what you can do."

"I'll find suitable accommodations." Singe assured him, before heading out of the room. As he left, Wrench looked to Snide.

"Are you sure we should trust him so readily?" Wrench asked him. "Maybe we should have a guard..."

"Who cares what he gets up to?" Snide told him, looking down on Fury with disgust. "If he can bring me an Energem, I might have to make some serious decisions about my staffing."

Tyler pulled up his jeep by the mines, parking just on the outside of the fence. He approached the gate, where a guard held up a hand to stop him.

"Sorry kid, this is private property." He told him.

"Yeah, I've got an appointment here." Tyler said to him. "I'm here to see Rusty Galloway."

"Do you have any ID?" He asked. Tyler handed over his drivers' licence. "One moment please."

Tyler waited patiently while the guard made a call down. He could see the guard giving him some suspicious glances, wondering why someone so young would want to come and see Rusty at an active mine. He came back over, putting his phone away.

"Alright, he's agreed to see you. I just need you to sign this and this." The guard told him. "This one's a waiver saying that you'll comply with all the health and safety regulations of the mine and absolving them of responsibility if anything happens. The other is a non-disclosure agreement. You won't be allowed to discuss anything you see in the mine with anyone."

Tyler quickly signed both forms. He'd been in far more dangerous caves than a regulated mine before completely by choice, and he didn't really care what they were digging up in the area. Once he heard whatever Rusty had to say, he really didn't care about the mine afterwards.

"Alright, here's a hard hat and a visitor's pass. You'll be required to wear those at all times inside the mine." He told Tyler, handing them and the driving licence to the Red Ranger. "Take the lift down, and you should find him at the bottom."

"Thanks." Tyler said as he put on the pass and the hard hat, before heading for the lift. It astounded him how long it took them to go down. It took nearly twenty whole minutes for the elevator to reach the bottom. The heat was stifling down there, and by the time he stepped off the elevator, he came into a huge clearing. Even down here, they were still a long way from the face. Tunnels ran off in several directions, and they were so vast there were actually trucks driving around in and out of the tunnels, carrying materials and workers. He looked around, and seeing someone coming past, he stopped him.

"Hey, I'm here to see Rusty Galloway." He stated. The man just looked up.

"HEY, RUSTY!" He called out. Tyler saw a man at a wooden table, covered in maps and charts looking up. There were a couple of others with him, but the one he was looking for, he recognised from some of his dad's pictures. He looked older, but it was unmistakably him. "You have a visitor!"

Rusty waved Tyler over, and said something to the others, sending them on their way with his instructions. A he got to the table; Rusty extended a hand, which Tyler accepted, shaking it.

"My God, as I live and breathe, Tyler Nevarro." He commented. "Jesus, you must have been about this big when I last saw you."

"You remember me?" Tyler asked him. Rusty just laughed.

"It'd be hard not to, James used to talk about you all the time!" He responded. Tyler furrowed his brows as Rusty gestured to him to take a seat.

"James?" He asked. "My dad's name was Neil."

"Well...yeah, it was but...you know he got into some scrapes and was found a few places he wasn't meant to be, so he used James to avoid a lot of heat." Rusty told him. "I guess it kind of stuck, because I called him that pretty much the entire time I knew him."

"I have a friend, Shelby. She talked to you recently at the university..."

"Yeah, I'm really sorry about that. Please, try not to take it personally." Rusty said to him, pulling out a flask and offering Tyler some coffee, which he politely refused. "James is...kind of a touchy subject for me. I was the last one to see him alive, and I've had a lot of people ask me about him ever since. When I found out you were here though, I figured if I should talk to anyone about what I know, it should be you."

"So when did you last see my dad?" Tyler asked him. Rusty took a deep breath as he prepared to begin.

"Alright, a lot of this isn't going to make any sense, but I need you to bear with me." Rusty warned him. "Your dad and I went out on a ship one time, looking for an island. Unfortunately our navigator was...well...it turned out he was drunk as all hell. We sailed for about four days in what turned out to be completely the wrong direction, before we hit some bad weather or something."

"Bad weather?" Tyler asked him. Rusty nodded his head.

"It's weird, it was like one minute we had completely clear skies and a silky-smooth ocean, the next, we're getting thrown around like a beach ball. I've never seen or experienced anything like it! Eventually, we got to the shore of an island. The weird thing was, there wasn't a cloud in the sky when we landed. The ship needed some repairs, so your dad, naturally, decided we should explore."

"You went with him?" Tyler asked him. Rusty just smiled.

"Of course, the island was just...like nothing I'd ever seen before! It was practically built on a volcano! The rock formations and mineral deposits just lying around were like nothing I've ever seen before, or since! Once we found some caves, we went in exploring."

"That definitely sounds like my dad." Tyler answered with a smile.

"We were exploring a huge cave network. We found some great formations. We went deep, maybe a lot deeper than we should have. We just kept finding treasure after treasure, the kind of thing that would make both of us famous...millions of times over! Then, everything started to go wrong. There was a tectonic shift, probably because of the volcano. The cave started to collapse.

Tyler gulped hearing this. He couldn't help thinking about Shelby's warning, that maybe Rusty was going to tell him something that he didn't want to hear.

"I tripped and fell as we tried to get out. James came back for me and saved my life, but then the cave collapsed around him." Rusty told him. "When the cave-in settled, I tried to dig him out, but there was so much rock...there was tons of it. We'd have needed heavy excavation equipment to get through it all. Tyler, your dad saved my life."

"But...he could have gotten out, right?" Tyler asked. This was the part that Rusty hated. He already knew the end to that story, but James had made it clear that he would tell Tyler himself if they confirmed it was safe that he was alive.

"Those caves...they went on for miles. Anything's possible." Rusty said in a non-committal way. "We waited as long as we could, but we ended up having to leave the island. We tried to go back to the island to confirm one way or another, but no matter how hard we tried...it was like the island had disappeared off the face of the Earth. You can imagine how much the Feds loved that story."

Tyler could empathise, because he knew one part of the story that Rusty didn't. The Rangers had found the Ankylo Zord on Gosei's island! The island was protected by technology that made it impossible to plot on a map, and nigh-near impossible to access unless one was invited. Gosei's island was close enough to the coast that it was possible they had found it once by accident, but then would be unable to find their way back. It was no wonder his search had hit a dead end. His dad was last seen on an island that as far as the rest of the world knew didn't even exist! Gosei's island was fertile, full of life, able to sustain species that were considered long since extinct in the rest of the world. If he had somehow gotten out of the cave, then it was plausible he would be able to survive on the island. His dad, if nothing else, was perfectly capable of living off the land.

"If anyone could find their way out, my dad could." Tyler declared. Rusty just smiled as he got up from the table.

"Well, you are your father's son, that's for sure!" He laughed. As Tyler picked up his stuff though, his Energem fell out of his shirt. Rusty stopped instantly, like he had seen a ghost. "Hey, that...that gem you have. Can I see it?"

"Yeah, sure." Tyler said, letting Rusty inspect it. Being a geologist, it was only natural that Rusty was interested to see an unusual specimen, but the way he looked at it, completely silently, he seemed like he was in a trance, and Tyler could swear he suddenly became very pale. "Where'd you find this?"

"Just on one of my hikes." Tyler lied as convincingly as he could. "It seemed that unique..."

"That my friend is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of find!" Rusty exclaimed as he handed it back. "That's really something! You be sure and hold onto that!"

"I intend to." Tyler answered. "Thanks for all your time Rusty."

As Tyler left, Rusty waited until the elevator was heading back up, before pulling out his phone.

"James? Tyler just left." He told him. "I think I can safely say I confirmed that your suspicions were right. He has one of those crystals, just like yours."

"Then I suppose it's up to me to make the next move." James answered. "Thanks for all your help Rusty."