Chapter 4: Monster Sighting
Even if school had been called off for one day, it resumed the next.
Mabel was disappointed.
She had a feeling that more days in school would only mean more trouble and more wearing of that monochrome suit (Kath would insist) and the madness of fighting things which, by right, should not exist.
But they did. And they were not the product of many a midnight snack of buttered peas. Well, sometimes she had them for lunch. Or tea. Or dinner. Or….well, that wasn't the point.
Those... things were solid to the touch, and were audibly present as well when they screeched and attacked. Mabel poked her headphones, wondering if she should bring them along next time to battle. Her eardrums would be glad for the protection.
Mabel tried her best to shrug off those thoughts as she trudged up the stairway. Kath and Mandric had called for a morning meeting before classes started. She knew what the hot topic was: What do we do now, since we're spandex-clad pendant-touting Rangers?
Mabel fingered the pendant that dangled from her neck. Upon closer inspection at home, she could describe it as a slim, cuboid-shaped ornament that was decorated evenly with white and black, and had compartments capable of transmitting audio and visual messages over from one device to another similar one via a strange transmitter. Mabel had not yet dared to dissect the strange contraption.
And strangely enough, it did not react to interfaces and communication signals, nor could its receiving signals be read by human gadgetry and machinations. The oven did not fry itself when she pointed and activated the object at the appliance, nor did the television blow up.
She strongly believed she was holding an alien gadget in her hands.
"Mabel!"
Shaken by shock, Mabel snapped out of her daydream, and found out that she had collided with Kath. Apparently, she had walked straight into her friend in spite of the shorter girl's attempts to catch her attention.
Nearby, Mandric and James were snickering.
"Daydreaming, weren't you?" James teased.
"Not at all. I was reflecting upon my recent and remarkable discoveries of the cuboid communicators-cum-pendants that we each sport," Mabel calmly set herself down at the desk which the two boys 'reserved' for the meeting, "and so far, I've speculated that each is capable of transmitting audio and visual frequencies to analogous machinations and no other devices."
They stared at her blankly.
"Don't go 'Billy' on us," Kath shook her head, "what do you mean –in layman's terms please?"
Mabel sighed, and rephrased with spots of hesitation, "I…tinkered with the…pendant last night and figured that we can send…video and audio messages to each other…and no one else."
"Like SMSing?" James supplied.
"Well, that's the bit I'm having trouble with."
"What do you mean?"
Here, Mabel gave a sigh of dismay, "Other than activating the messaging component by sliding this panel down-" she indicated with her own pendant, placing her thumb at the lower end of the ornament, "I have not realized the other possibilities of this… this thing."
James's features gave no hint of understanding.
"Just…..look at it! I see no conceivable way of utilizing the capabilities of such a device without resorting to dismemberment! And I'm not even sure if that endeavour would prove successful."
For all her bluster, Mabel still had lost faces staring back at her.
'Grief, I have to translate myself!'
"I mean to say, I can't find other uses unless I tear this apart! And I don't think that will help either."
The look of immense realization dawning on James's face almost drove Mabel to pummel him with her fists, but she shot a look instead.
Kath immediately diverted the topic, "So, guys," she sat herself between Mabel and James, "since we are heroes now, what are we going to do?"
"What do you mean?" Mabel queried. Here we go.
"I mean, we're supposed to be grouping together more often, and get to know each other better!"
"If this is going to lead to a BGR-"
"It won't, Mabel. I just mean we will have to unite, be a team, a capable and efficient team ready to combat the evils that threaten our world!" Kath rose and clasped the table edge with one hand and raised the other in a balled fist to emphasize.
Mandric coughed, "corny inspirational speech, Kath."
What he got back was a dark glower from the spectacled girl.
"Anyway," James quickly intervened, "no more fighting, more thinking. I think Kath means to say that if we are the new protectors, we will have to sharpen our abilities to thwart enemies and work together to accomplish that."
Kath gave the others a sneer of 'Hahaha-I'm-right' and the others have piped down and nodded to James's reasoning.
'At least he's a little sane,' Mabel mused silently.
"You do judo, Kath?" Mandric asked.
Kath nodded eagerly, "Yellow belt. Going to work harder at it."
"Cool! Can we join in?" Mandric smiled.
"Doubt it."
"Then you can teach us! Show us the moves, and we'll catch the groove," Mabel suggested.
"That, I may be able to do. You guys better help me too then."
"Right," Mandric noted a point off his agenda, "and getting together?"
"I think we'll have to enlarge our seating capacity for lunchtime, Kath," Mabel looked to her friend.
Kath nodded that back. Even if it was Billy-speech, she could still catch it, but Mabel rarely spoke Billy-speech, but here she was ranting it off.
'Must've been delayed shock from being a Ranger,' Kath decided.
"And if monsters attack during class-time?" James too had seen enough Power Ranger episodes in his heydays to understand.
"We'll have to jump out of them halfway, I'm afraid," Mabel was finally talking normally, "unless someone has a better solution."
"And one more question," Mandric took his turn, "who's the leader?"
For once, the group was silent.
Eyes began to dart between Mandric and Kath. Those two were the obvious choices: both had called this meeting and both were trying to sort things out for the team. Mabel would have rooted for Kath, and James for Mandric, so it would have been a tie if they tried to vote.
And neither were Kath or Mandric eager to accept the demanding role of the leader of a misfit group of peers.
Someone behind them cleared his throat, and that relieved the uneasy silence that hung in the air. The boys turned around while the girls looked up.
It was two of the classmates, Trevor and Kent. Both were eager lads, with blonde streaks running through their spiked black hair that stood upright stubbornly, and both wore similar sunglasses, framed quicksilver and wore equally wide grins. The two boys were well-known as "those bad-boy rejects": Cases of missing homework, absence from most classes and loud heavy metal blaring from the back of the lecture hall and even more cases of school-sin made up the boys' lists.
Both were almost mistaken as twins too, ever since they took a trend to dress up alike and do everything as a pair. The only way one could have distinguished one from another was that Trevor liked black and Kent liked white.
And Mabel could not help but glance down her neck to assure herself that her pendant was out of sight. There was no telling what those two would do if they saw a girl touting their signature colours.
"Hey, Man! Hey, J! Wanna jam with us later?" Trevor sat next to Mandric.
"We booked Studio D for a chill-out session," Kent sided up to James, "and the teacher's letting us two hours of fun."
"Cool!" Mandric turned all talk of hero-nonsense aside, "But we don't have our stuff right now…"
The similar-clad boys grinned and gestured to the guitar bags strapped to them.
"Cool!" James sat up, his eyes behind his specs gleaming.
Trevor's eyes wandered through the original group of four: two boys and two girls…
"Hey, Mandric, she's your girl?" Trevor thrusted a thumb in Kath's direction.
"No!" Kath immediately defended herself.
"And no ideas from you, Kent," Mabel shot back, "No one are items here."
The eyes of the two boys, however, were still brimming with mirth and a decided impishness.
"Fine," Trevor raised his hands and backed off, and Kent did likewise. They winked at Mandric and James, "See you at one!"
"And I call this meeting to a close," Mabel whispered in a hushed tone, "before anyone starts to have ideas not of us as mysterious heroes that just appeared yesterday but as couples!"
Goldar looked around, completely lost.
This was the place where yesterday's battle took place?
It definitely did not look like a battlefield.
In fact, it was far from what Lord Zedd had reported. It was not 'torn to barren ground' nor 'scorched and reeked of burning wreckage' or even 'mundanely chrome-coloured'.
In fact, he was looking at a rainbow of colours. Blue metal-plastic chairs with black backs, white tabletops with the common yellow-streaked litter or brown tray with red utensils. All of them were standing upright, none of them were burnt.
But whatever the case, no one seemed to be about. Goldar knew how humans looked like, somewhat like Rita but not as ugly. There were none of them in sight.
"Good thing too," the alien murmured to himself as he strode on purposefully through the canteen. He had orders (from himself) NOT to meet the humanoids on this planet. They all were Power Rangers, he safely reasoned.
He knew perfectly well what he had to do: Implant a chip he had programmed personally, into a machine of some sort. A virus inside the chip should do the rest from there on.
So he had to find, first of all, a machine those Rangers would use.
And just at that moment, a carton box stood alone, not too far from him on one of the aforementioned benches.
He should not look in there. It was sealed and addressed to a 'recording studio', whatever that meant, and of all things it was sealed with, it was with red duct-tape and a stamp that warned any curious passers-by 'DO NOT OPEN'.
With a scratch of his nails, the red tape failed its duty. The flaps were removed and he saw what was inside: a strange ice-cream-with-a-cone shaped… thing.
But something caught his attention: It was a machine.
There were more of the machines in the box, but he decided that the one in his claws would be the lucky one.
He unscrewed the cap off, removed an offending circular disc, and was rewarded with the view of wiring and a chip.
He placed his chip next to that chip, and replaced all the contents with dexterity.
And with that, he slunk away to be beamed up by an impatient Baboo.
"Check out the loot!"
Mandric raised an eyebrow as Kent carried something in his arms into the studio.
"What's that?"
"New mics!" Trevor gleefully replied as he raised two from the stock of ten.
James took out one and studied it. Dynamic, featured a bass boost, looked very sturdy.
"Cool…" James swung the equipment around, while the other three set up the systems and gave their guitars a tuning.
But Trevor was more than ready to give the spanking new products a field test.
He yelled into a hooked-up microphone with a ripped heavy-metal fashion and sent a riff up his guitar. The amplifiers resonated with the sudden attack of noise, but the boys nodded in approval.
The goods were delivered.
Another ripping voice reverberated, followed by a flurry of bass and lead guitar notes flying and the insane smashing of drums and cymbals as the song ended.
Mandric wiped away rivulets of sweat that trickled down his face, and James himself was looking more or less a mess. Trevor at the microphone and Kent at the drums were panting, but they all wore a large grin on their faces, ear to ear.
"That rocked," Kent admitted, and the other boys nodded in agreement.
It was then they heard a robotic 'bleep' from the amplifiers, and the sound of Trevor's hard-metal-voice ripped through the room, "Activation: Micro-Mecha! Destroy the Rangers!"
Mandric looked to James in that instant, while Kent and Trevor had a fleeting look of confusion.
The microphone that stood in front of Trevor leapt from its stand, to the muted horror of the boys, and began snaking its way to the middle of the room. The microphones that were rooted next to the guitar amplifiers and the drums also had eased themselves away from their stands and were following the possessed microphone to the centre of the room.
In total fear and cries of horror, the boys fled the studio, the guitars still strapped to James and Mandric while Trevor and Kent ran free. Flying ahead, Trevor and Kent were the first to dash to another part of the school.
But James and Mandric slowed to a halt, with some assistance from the guitars still strapped to them.
"That was weird," Mandric decided, panting heavily.
"Not weird. It's trouble," James corrected mid shallow breaths, "and it's time for the Rangers."
"Right. How did Mabel work this thing?" Mandric started fingering his pendant, but James had already activated his.
"Mabel! Kath! Monster! I repeat, Monster!"
Mabel and Kath made their way to the front foyer. They received the alert mere minutes after their lecture, and were in the least of moods to do anything more active than heading to the canteen for lunch, and both were ravenous.
But both girls had not anticipated the hasty alert that Mandric sent, and both had to dart to a shaded area of the school building to morph, and hurried to where the two frantic boys were, clad in their spandex suits.
People gave way immediately as the two charged down the stairways. Kath was leaping down two steps at a time, Mabel resorting to the banister for speed. All the Rainbow Ranger could think of right now, hunger put aside, was the thrill of their first monster- fight. Fear was the last emotion that inhibited her mind then.
But it did when she felt someone grab her arm and a finger directed her to the sight both had missed.
A monster stood before them.
No, that lacked description.
A gargantuan beast stood before them. Cables made up its arms and legs, amplifiers were its feet, a drum set its chest and (strangely enough) microphones made up fingers and eyes.
And the eyes were glowing red. Mabel nearly queried about microphones having LEDs in them, and Kath would not have cared.
The monster gave a bellow, a high-pitched screech a hard metal rocker would yell incessantly in his songs.
"Micro-Mecha kill Rangers!" it screeched shrilly, raised its foot and brought it down – on two rather familiar boys.
Kath immediately lunged forward, leaving her friend in the dust and shoved the male Rangers aside, putting herself in harm's way.
Mabel almost yelped, and in horror, turned away to avoid the sight of impending doom and almost anticipated the death-cry of her friend.
It never came. But what Mabel heard were gasps of shock, and possibly awe.
Daring to look back, Mabel saw that her friend had done the miraculous: Hands extended above her head, she was holding off the monster's foot by sheer strength.
And (Mabel almost guffawed) Kath had quailed under the foot and even though she did what a hero did, she looked much like a petrified pipsqueak. That would be blackmail for another day.
Mabel then looked at James and Mandric, who were already morphed when they were nearly squished. The gold and silver figures, and herself, looked puny compared to the monster, so how were they to overpower it?
And Kath, her good friend whom she should never desert, was still fending off the foot with every intent not to let her arms give way.
From her place on the stairway, despite the throng of people who now had moved to the second floor far behind her and watched on (and she could feel their gazes upon her), Mabel thought. Scenario upon scenario flashed through her mind, pondering which action would leave Kath in one piece and the microphone monster in many pieces.
And the monster was still fuming and raging, like a rabid pit-bull lunging on its leash.
"Micro-Mecha kill Rangers!" It shrieked, a distorted voice reverberating in her helmet, and obviously everyone's ears.
When the scenario of choice came to mind and she gave it the go-ahead (though still with a hint of reluctance), she looked up to Kath, with something of a short tilt of thought to the unfortunate girl still pinned under the monster. Micro-Mecha, as it has christened itself, was not going to live long.
She just about hollered her instructions when she caught herself. She nearly said their names, and if she had, she would never hear the end of it from the others.
"Gold, approach the monster from behind! Silver, take the front! I'll take the other side! Rainbow, keep at it!"
"I am I am!" Kath shouted back, and Mabel caught a tinge of chagrin in her voice. She still had her wit. She was fine.
James moved first, slowly edging around the monster, and Micro-Mecha eyed him with his LED eyes. Mandric followed suit, slowly approaching the mech directly at the front. Mabel herself then slunk to the monster's right. Kath, still pinned under the monster's foot, struggled to keep the foot from descending any further.
When the monster was surrounded, Mabel looked to Kath and gave a nod to Kath.
'Forgive me for this!'
"Hey, Micro-Mecha! You over-sized slag-built coward! You can't hurt a Ranger! You can't even hurt a fly!"
And the beast heard the rude comments. It growled at the Zen Ranger, and retorted, "Micro-Mecha hurt Ranger!"
Her ears rang as the distorted voice shot straight at her.
"Then prove it! Crush her!"
Obviously, she was directing at the unfortunate Rainbow Ranger, who must have waned at that.
"WHAT THE-"
Kath immediately felt the change of pressure. Suddenly, much more force came down on her, but she miraculously kept her ground.
Then, she heard the war cries from her team, and suddenly the strain vanished. She then noticed she was no longer shadowed, and looked up.
The monster had staggered back, a shrill cry rose from the beast. Kath could easily see the black-and-white, gold and silver figures clinging on the side, back and abdomen respectively.
Mabel climbed up the mass of cables with much more ease than she expected. Maybe it's the thrill that the plan worked. The equilibrium of the monster was upset when it bore its leg down on Kath, and the other side was weaker and less stable. With a heave from her part, the monster had staggered. The boys leapt at the monster, and Mabel had already made her ascent on the mechanical Mount Everest.
A cheer rose from somewhere in the background, and Mabel kept climbing. She could see James making better progress, the back being the best spot on the monster to climb.
Mandric was at the same level as her.
The monster was not happy about the new parasites, and was swinging around fervently in a desperate attempt to dislodge the Rangers. The three Rangers clung on, fighting against the centripedal force.
And a sonorous clang resounded from above. Mabel tilted to look, to find a bench meeting its end by the gigantic monster's foot.
But the spinning had stopped, and Mabel fought dizziness to climb.
"Gold! Silver! We need to distract the monster!"
"One distraction, coming up!" James had reached the monster's shoulder.
He lunged for the eyes of the monster, and shielded the lit microphones with his hands.
"I suggest you stay put, mech!"
Now Mandric and Mabel hastened their climb up the being's chest, and reached their destination: the heart of the monster.
"Look at this! A microphone is a heart!" Mandric pointed.
Both were staring at the head of a microphone, steadily flashing like what Mabel recalled as a heart-light from Bionicle.
"And that's what we'll need." Mabel slid her hand through the mesh of cables and groped for the connection of the mentioned microphone.
Instantly the monster responded with a yowl of panic and its gigantic hand grasped for the parasite at its chest.
Mabel barely had the chance to slip her hand out of the mesh and lower herself. The hand had missed her, but it got Mandric.
He disappeared from her side, and Mabel once again snuck her hand for the connection. When she felt the clip and the end of the microphone, she grinned.
And tugged the cable. Hard.
Now the monster's scream had a new tone in it, Kath was positive about it. The cry drove the horde of students at the stairs backward in shock at the sudden intensity of the sound. Mabel leapt off the monster and James followed suit, both Rangers landing on their feet and hands. Mandric, however, was unceremoniously released from the hand that threatened to strangle him and landed in a heap on the ground.
The two helped a whining Mandric (who was whining about why he was the only one getting hurt in the battles) to a safe distance from the enraged beast, and Kath joined them.
Micro-Mecha's cry diminished into a whimper as its cable-mesh body gave way. The cables loosened and were back to their flimsy and limp state. The body would not hold, and the monster crumpled to the ground in a flurry of black cables falling like rain to the ground.
The silence that followed after was of some tension, and a cheer rose from the crowd behind.
The four Rangers turned to face them, a little unsure of what to expect.
"Time to make an exit," a whisper came through the Gold, Silver and Zen Rangers' helmets, "stage left and to the stadium."
And they ran.