This story is to promote my newest challenge, Power Rangers Custom. Details are in the Original Ranger Teams Forum under Challenges. It's highly recommended for those who want to test their writings skills. And with that, on with the story!

Power Rangers Zone Wars

Drop Zone

Mid-West United States, 1864

The midday sun beat down on a ghost town as a horse clomped down the dirt street, his rider's spurs jingling softly. The faded signs all around them announced their building's original purpose: Hotel, Grocery Store, Saloon, Sheriff's Office.

The cowboy, who looked about thirty, took his hat off of his head and dusted it off, his blond hair messy from wearing it for so long. He pulled his horse's reigns and dismounted, his rattlesnake boots hitting the ground with a thump. The dust it kicked up got on his black pants, but he didn't seem to care. The cowboy rubbed his stubbly chin as he took the horse's reigns and tied it to the post in front of the Sheriff's Office.

Looking around, the office seeming like nothing much: two empty jail cells with wooden benches and a bucket for getting rid of waste, a wood stove, three chairs and a wooden desk. Now, for what he had come for. The cowboy walked over to the desk and opened a drawer. It didn't have much in it either: a six-shooter and a few bullets, old wanted posters, a few valuables. Finally, after scavenging through the drawer, he found it: the golden pocket watch that his grandfather had given to him. On the outside was inscribed "John McArthur", this his granddad had done for him (he was a goldsmith), and a date which was hard to see because of the dust.

John McArthur smiled as he opened his pocket watch. The upper part was empty while the bottom half was the actual watch. The clock had obviously stopped. Then again, it was a pocket watch; if you didn't rewind it, then it would stop working. John gently took the dial on the watch and twisted it to the right, but the watch didn't restart. Instead, it started to glow green and purple and hummed eerily.

"What in the Sam Hill?" the cowboy said before being transported over time and space.

Zone 1, 3091

John McArthur looked around at the desecrated landscape and the blacked out sky. Around were explosions, laser guns shooting, planes whooshing overhead, and bombs whistling through the air. One of these was relatively close to John, causing him to fly into a nearby trench. John's hat flew right off of his head and mud smeared his face and clothes.

The cowboy could hear rapid fire orders that reminded him of how his older brother described the war with the Yanks when he went to visit them in Virginia. General Lee was over him, and probably would be over John, too, if it wasn't for the Gold Rush. John looked at his pocket watch and wandered into his memories.

It was 1849 when he had decided to go with his grandfather to California. Being only fifteen, his parents had strongly opposed, but his mind was made up. In the dead of night, he snuck off to his grandfather's and was headed west with the old man. John had gotten a job on a ranch as a wrangler while his granddad worked in prospecting the land he had bought.

Suddenly, a voice cut off all those memories with a bark: "Hey, you! What are you doing lying down on the job?"

John hopped up to his feet and replied, "Pardon me, but I don't reckon I belong here."

The cowboy turned around to see a burly man in muddy army fatigues, cradling a rifle, or at least what looked like a rifle to John, in his right arm.

"Oh, really?" the soldier replied sardonically, "Who is the president?"

"That's easy. Jefferson Davis is the Confederacy's president and Lincoln is the Union's," John answered, a genuine smile on his face.

The soldier looked at the cowboy, surprised. Then again, it could have been the bomb that went off nearby. The two fell away from the bomb, being slung into the mud. The soldier wiped the mud off of his face as did John, the latter rather annoyed to have slid through the mud twice in his work clothes. The two got up, the soldier being the first one up. He offered John his hand, which the cowboy accepted.

"Then, you're from before the assassination," the soldier noted to himself.

John heard this and looked at the soldier, confused. "The what?"

"The Union won the Civil war in 1865 and Lincoln was shot by Booth at the theater a little while later," the soldier recalled aloud.

John snapped his fingers. "Aw, shoot. And I thought we were winning. Well, we were until Grant showed up."

"So, you're…" the soldier continued, still a little shocked.

John looked around for his hat, found it, put it on, and tilted it down. "The name's John McArthur, at your service."

The soldier nodded, "Tony Owens, General for Zone 1."

"Zone 1?" John inquired, sitting down on the ground.

"You've been transported to the year 3091," Owens explained. "I have to catch you up on a lot of stuff. After the Civil War, the South returns to the Union after Reconstruction. In 1914, there's a world war. At the time, it was called the Great War, but we know it as World War I. It ended with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, along with a few other treaties. Just about that time came what we call the Roaring Twenties…"

After a few minutes of drawling on with the history lesson, including the affairs of SPD and Time Force, Owens finally got to the more recent events.

"…After the arrest of Ransik, the public hailed Time Force as heroes. However, a few years later, an alien force known as Voltage that had been hiding on Earth since 2011 came and wiped them out overnight. They forced us into Zones and then forced the Zones to fight each other until one Zone is left. The only Zones left now are Zones 1 through 5, 10, and 23,415,609," Owens concluded, a little out of breath.

John stared at the soldier and sat on the ground. "All of this history that I missed. I just came here because of my lost watch."

The cowboy held up his pocket watch to the soldier, who looked at it in delighted surprise.

"Which means you can go back!" Owens exclaimed excitedly. "It was revealed lately that Voltage was hiding in a little town that disappeared on May 7, 2011 without a trace."

John jumped up excitedly. "Hey, isn't today May 7? It was when I was in 1864."

Owens frowned in concentration. "The days blur together. I'll have to check."

The soldier looked down at his wristwatch, which suddenly began to glow. The upper half of John's pocket began to glow as well, John's face showing on the place above the clock itself.

"What the…" Owens began, looking up at John who looked back.

John pointed to the watch. "Who made that?"

Owens looked at the watch and replied, "It was made from the gold of a certain goldsmith that did his own prospecting after the land ran dry in the 20's. Every few years, people upgrade the face of the watch. Can't quite remember what Mom said his name was. It was something along the lines of Boone. Or was it Baring? Maybe Brunson? Banner?"

"Benson?" John offered.

"That's it," Owens replied with a nod, "Earl Benson."

John nodded. "That's my granddad. He made me this watch from the first gold he ever prospected."

Owens nodded back. "So, the anomalies in these timepieces are connected."

John looked at Owens's wristwatch curiously. "The anoma-what?"

"The weird things. Y'know, you travelling to this time from 1864. I think that it latched onto my watch and the two connected somehow."

John gaped and replied, "Oh."

"It must be that mild radiation they said was in the gold," Owens said, looking at his watch face. "Yeah, it's May 7."

"Which means that, I can catch the disappearance in the act and stop it," John said, looking at the soldier.

Owens thought for a minute, then rummaged through his pockets until he found the item he was looking for. He looked down and smiled.

"Get someone from that time to use this," Owens said, offering him a deck of cards.

John took the cards and examined them for a moment. The backs of the cards were red with white trim around edges with a stylized Hindu-Arabic numeral one surrounded by a circle in the middle of the card. Shuffling through the deck, John noted that these were not playing cards. He stopped at one that had the picture of a mechanized gorilla on it and looked at Owens in confusion.

"This is the Rouge Deck, the pride of Zone 1," Owens explained. "It endows the user with great strength, like that of a gorilla. What you need to do is get Zones 2 through 5's decks as well as the Scan Morphers in Zone 2."

John scratched his head. "So, what are the decks?"

"A man from Zone 3 once said theirs was called the Noir Deck," Owens replied, scratching his chin. "Zone 2 has had their Bleu Deck for a while. Few years after that, Zone 4 got their Jaune Deck. Zone 5 recently got theirs, the Rose Deck."

John's eyes were wide at this point. "So, how exactly am I supposed to get these Decks?"

"Go to the other Zones and find an officer with something similar to this on," Owens replied, tugging at a pen that was ruby encrusted pen with the number one on it on his lapel. "Then tell them 'Voltage is decreasing'. They'll know what it means."

The two ducked as a bomb went off in front of the trench. John looked at Owens like he was crazy.

"I have to go through that?" the cowboy said, pointing skeptically at the no man's land before him.

"Of course not," Owens replied, lifting a board on the ground, revealing a flight of dusty stairs. "This is a network underneath the Zones. You go down here, you find the doors that are marked two, three, four, and five, and be courteous: knock before anything else."

John nodded and told him with a smile. "Wish me luck."

With that, the cowboy descended the stairs, the wooden board shutting behind him.

Trivia: This was my challenge:

W – Aliens

O – War

L - Western

F – Covert Operations

S – Stats

B – Numbers

A – "Voltage"

N – Time travel

E – Cards of some sort

X – Animal spirits

Of course, not everything has quite come into play yet, but that's to come. So, if you're going to do the challenge, don't be afraid to PM me.