tamesg

[tamesg]

The Psychological Test

Chapter 1

The money made a soft sound as Mrs. Tanaka counted it—not the crisp snap of new bills, but the whispered rustle of currency that had passed through many hands, been folded and refolded, worried smooth by fingers that understood its weight. She worked methodically at her kitchen table, the morning light through cherry-blossom curtains casting pink shadows across the neat stacks.

Seventy-five years had taught Hanako Tanaka that money was like water—it could slip away when you weren't watching, disappear into cracks you never noticed until it was gone. Banks were for people who had never lost everything overnight, who had never learned that safety was something you created with your own hands, in your own space, under your own careful watch.

She divided the bills into two equal piles with the precision of someone performing a ritual. Half went into the cloth bag that would journey back to Japan, to her daughter's struggling family. The other half she wrapped carefully in a silk handkerchief—her insurance against the kinds of disasters that came without warning.

The ceramic pot sat on its shelf like a patient guardian. It was large enough to hold the bonsai tree whose roots had grown comfortable in the space she'd carved out for necessities. Mrs. Tanaka lifted the tree gently, placed the wrapped money in the hollow she'd created, then settled the plant back into position. To anyone else, it would look like nothing more than an old woman's dedication to keeping something green and alive in her small world.

The knock at the door came as she was smoothing the last wrinkles from the newspaper she'd spread over the remaining money. Through the window, she glimpsed the familiar uniform of the postal service.

"Express delivery from Japan, Mrs. Tanaka."

The envelope felt substantial in her hands, and her heart lifted with the particular joy reserved for unexpected contact with family. She signed with the careful English letters she'd practiced for decades, then closed the door and tore open the package with trembling fingers.

The photograph was everything she had hoped for and more. Little Kenji, barely two years old, captured mid-step in his grandmother's garden in Kyoto. His chubby arms stretched out for balance, his face bright with the concentration of someone discovering they could move through the world on their own power. Behind him, cherry blossoms caught the light like scattered promises.

Mrs. Tanaka carried the photograph to the mantelpiece, adjusting it until it caught the morning sun just right. The boy's expression seemed to change as she watched—now determined, now surprised by his own success, now purely delighted with the simple fact of forward motion.

"First steps, little Kenji," she murmured to the image. "Grandma so proud."

She didn't notice the shadow that passed by her window, or the way it paused when the light from inside revealed the exact placement of things that mattered.

Chapter 2

David Fukiya understood the psychology of trust better than most people understood their own motivations. It was a subject he'd studied extensively—not just in the academic sense, though his dissertation on criminal behavior patterns would benefit from the research, but in the practical application of how human beings convinced themselves to believe what they wanted to believe.

The coffee shop near UCLA was perfect for this kind of conversation. Busy enough that no one would remember two graduate students talking over lattes, casual enough that James Saito would feel comfortable sharing information he probably shouldn't. Fukiya had chosen the booth in the back corner, positioned so he could watch Saito's face while appearing to focus on his own concerns.

"I'm telling you, David, I don't know how much longer I can keep this up." Saito looked exactly like what he was—a man running on too little sleep and too much caffeine, wearing clothes he'd slept in because there hadn't been time to change between his job at the campus bookstore and his job at the downtown library. "Three jobs, full course load... I fell asleep in Morrison's seminar yesterday. Actually fell asleep."

Fukiya made appropriate sympathetic sounds while calculating. Saito was the type who would feel guilty about financial problems, who would see them as personal failings rather than systemic issues. The kind of person who might do something desperate if pushed far enough, especially if that desperation could be... guided in the right direction.

"Maybe you should consider taking a semester off," Fukiya suggested, keeping his voice carefully neutral. "Focus on earning money, get yourself stable before diving back into coursework."

"With what money?" Saito's laugh had no humor in it. "My landlady's already threatening eviction. Mrs. Tanaka's been patient, but there's only so long she can wait for rent."

The opening Fukiya had been waiting for. He leaned forward with practiced concern. "Financial troubles?"

Saito glanced around the coffee shop, then lowered his voice. "The crazy thing is, I know she's got money. Lots of it. She thinks I don't notice, but I've seen her counting it. Thousands of dollars, David. She keeps it hidden somewhere in that kitchen of hers."

"Really?" Fukiya's tone suggested mild academic interest, the kind a psychology student might have in unusual behavior patterns. "That seems... financially unwise."

"She doesn't trust banks. Something about losing everything during the war, having to start over with nothing." Saito rubbed his eyes, and Fukiya noticed the slight tremor in his hands—exhaustion, stress, the physical manifestation of someone approaching their breaking point. "But man, if I could just borrow a little..."

Fukiya let the silence stretch just long enough, then asked the question with exactly the right amount of casual curiosity: "Where does she keep it exactly?"

By the time Saito described the ceramic pot in detail—its size, its placement, the way Mrs. Tanaka thought no one noticed her careful arrangement of the bonsai tree—Fukiya had already begun planning. Not the crude, impulsive kind of planning that marked amateur criminals, but the methodical psychological architecture that would ensure success while creating the perfect scapegoat.

The beautiful thing about human nature, Fukiya reflected as he walked toward Little Tokyo that afternoon, was how consistently people created their own destruction. All you had to do was provide the right opportunities and watch them make the choices they were already inclined to make.

Chapter 3

Mrs. Tanaka had been expecting the young man ever since James mentioned his friend from the university was working on some kind of research project. She'd put on her best dress—the navy blue one with small flowers that her daughter had sent from Japan—and spent extra time arranging the tea service just so.

When David Fukiya appeared at her door with his notebook and earnest smile, she felt the particular satisfaction that came from being useful to someone pursuing education. Learning was sacred; she had always believed this. The young man was polite, well-spoken, and respectful in the way that suggested good family training.

"Mrs. Tanaka? I'm David Fukiya, James Saito's friend from the university. I'm working on my doctoral thesis about Japanese-American family structures, and I was wondering if I could interview you?"

His pronunciation of her name was perfect—not the hesitant, anglicized version most Americans attempted, but the proper sounds shaped by someone who understood the language. This attention to detail pleased her enormously.

"Interview? Like on television?"

His laugh was warm, genuine. "Not quite. Just questions about your experiences, your family. It would help my research tremendously."

She invited him in with the kind of pride reserved for moments when her small world expanded to include something larger than itself. The tea ceremony took on extra significance—this would be part of academic research, documented somewhere in the great conversation between past and future that universities existed to preserve.

As she prepared the tea with elaborate care, Mrs. Tanaka noticed how the young man's eyes moved around her living space. Not rudely, not intrusively, but with the kind of careful observation she associated with people who noticed details others missed. Good qualities in a researcher.

His gaze lingered on the family photograph she'd positioned that morning, and she felt a flush of grandmother's pride.

"What a beautiful photograph."

"My great-grandson! Just arrived this morning from Japan. First steps! Soon he run everywhere, like his grandfather." She couldn't help the way her voice lifted with joy. The photograph seemed to glow in the afternoon light, little Kenji's determined expression captured forever at the moment of discovery.

She set down the tea service with the ceremony the moment deserved, then settled across from her guest with the satisfaction of hospitality properly offered.

"Now, what you want to know about old Japanese woman?"

David Fukiya opened his notebook, but she noticed the way his attention seemed divided—part of him focused on her answers, part of him cataloguing something else entirely. The psychology student in him, perhaps, automatically observing human behavior patterns.

"Well, I'm particularly interested in how traditional values adapt to American life. For instance, do you still maintain traditional attitudes toward... money? Savings?"

The question made her stiffen slightly. Money was indeed a private matter, something not discussed with strangers, even polite young researchers. But she could see the academic nature of his inquiry, the way it fit into the larger framework of cultural adaptation he was studying.

"Money very private matter," she said carefully.

"Of course, of course. I just meant in general terms..."

As she reached for the teapot, Mrs. Tanaka noticed how intently the young man watched her movements. Academic observation, she told herself, though something about his attention felt different from simple research interest. More focused. More... calculating.

The interview continued with gentle, appropriate questions about family traditions, about the balance between honoring the past and embracing American opportunities. David Fukiya was an excellent listener, encouraging her to elaborate on details, showing genuine interest in the small ways that culture persisted through daily choices.

But throughout their conversation, Mrs. Tanaka couldn't shake the feeling that he was studying something beyond what she was telling him. The way his eyes returned again and again to the kitchen, to the arrangement of her possessions, to the careful order she'd created in her small world.

When he finally left, thanking her profusely for her time and promising to send her a copy of his finished research, Mrs. Tanaka felt the peculiar emptiness that comes after sharing too much with someone you don't quite know well enough.

She spent the evening reorganizing things that didn't need reorganizing, unable to explain why the young man's visit had left her feeling somehow exposed.

Chapter 4

Lieutenant Columbo stood outside the boarding house in Little Tokyo, squinting at the street signs and feeling like he'd wandered into a movie he hadn't bought a ticket for. The characters looked familiar—police cars, crime scene tape, the usual urban geometry of investigation—but everything else felt foreign in ways that made his detective instincts both sharper and more uncertain.

The signs were in languages he couldn't read, though he thought he recognized some of them from that restaurant his wife had taken him to last month. She'd insisted it was cultural education, though mostly he remembered struggling with chopsticks while she tried not to laugh at him. The smells were different too—something cooking somewhere that reminded him of that dinner, but also something else, something he couldn't identify but that felt important in a way he couldn't explain.

Sergeant Murphy approached with the particular expression that meant they had a straightforward case with complications nobody wanted to think about too hard.

"Victim is Mrs. Hanako Tanaka, 75. Landlady of the boarding house. Found dead this morning by one of her tenants."

"Mrs. Ta-NAH-ka?" Columbo tried, squinting at his notebook as he attempted to write it down.

Murphy shrugged. "Close enough, Lieutenant. Looks like she took a fall, hit her head on the corner of the kitchen counter. But here's the thing—the tenant who found her had a large sum of cash on him. Claims he found it at the scene."

"How much money are we talking about?"

"Few thousand dollars. Says he was just trying to secure evidence."

Columbo nodded slowly, but something about the setup felt off in a way he couldn't articulate. Maybe it was the neighborhood itself—too quiet, too careful, like a place where people noticed things but didn't necessarily talk about them to strangers with badges. Maybe it was the way Murphy kept glancing around like he was hoping someone else would handle the cultural complications.

"The tenant who found her—where is he now?"

"Downtown. Booked him an hour ago. James Saito, graduate student at UCLA. Says he was behind on rent, came to talk to the landlady about payment arrangements."

"And he just happened to find money lying around?"

"That's his story."

Before Columbo could respond, he noticed a young man approaching the crime scene tape with the kind of purposeful stride that suggested official business. Well-dressed, confident, carrying something wrapped in cloth like he was bringing evidence to a church service.

"Excuse me," the man called to the officer manning the perimeter. "I'm here about Mrs. Tanaka. I have some evidence I need to turn in."

The officer pointed toward Columbo, and the young man approached with an expression of civic concern that was either completely genuine or very well practiced.

"Lieutenant? I'm David Fukiya. I believe I have something that might be important to your investigation."

He held up the cloth bundle with the careful reverence of someone handling something valuable. Columbo studied him with the kind of attention he usually reserved for witnesses who were trying too hard to be helpful.

"That's very civic-minded of you, Mr..."

"Fukiya. F-U-K-I-Y-A." He spelled it patiently, like someone accustomed to dealing with people who couldn't pronounce his name correctly.

"Right. And you came to check on Mrs... the victim because...?"

"I interviewed her yesterday for my doctoral thesis. Lovely woman. When I saw all the police cars, I was concerned." His voice carried exactly the right mixture of academic detachment and human sympathy.

Columbo unwrapped the bundle carefully, revealing several thousand dollars in cash—old bills, well-handled, the kind of money that had been saved rather than earned quickly.

"This is a lot of money to just find lying around."

"I know. That's why I brought it straight to you. Obviously, whoever did this was after money, but they must have dropped some in their hurry to escape."

The explanation was logical, public-spirited, and delivered with the kind of confidence that suggested David Fukiya was accustomed to being believed without question. But something about it bothered Columbo in the same way that perfectly organized crime scenes bothered him—too neat, too convenient, too much like what someone would expect rather than what actually happened.

"Obviously," Columbo repeated slowly. "Well, Mr. Fukiya, this is very helpful. We'll need you to come down to the station, fill out some paperwork..."

"Of course. Anything I can do to help catch whoever did this terrible thing."

As Fukiya walked away, Columbo found himself studying the young man's retreating figure with the kind of attention usually reserved for evidence that didn't quite fit the pattern everyone else was seeing. Something about the timing, maybe. Too convenient, arriving just as the investigation was getting started with exactly the kind of evidence that supported the obvious theory.

Or maybe it was something else entirely. The way Fukiya had described finding the money—"scattered near the back door"—like he'd rehearsed the explanation. The way his concern for Mrs. Tanaka seemed perfectly calibrated, neither too emotional nor too detached.

Columbo stood in the afternoon light of Little Tokyo, surrounded by signs he couldn't read and sounds he couldn't identify, feeling like he was looking at a puzzle where all the pieces fit together too perfectly to be telling the truth.

Chapter 5

The inside of Mrs. Tanaka's apartment felt like stepping into a careful arrangement of memories. Every surface had been dusted, every object placed with the kind of precision that suggested ritual rather than simple housekeeping. Columbo moved through the space slowly, his hands clasped behind his back in the way that meant he was seeing more than he was saying.

The forensics photographer had finished with the kitchen, where a dark stain on the linoleum marked where Mrs. Tanaka had fallen. The corner of the counter showed a small chip in the Formica—sharp enough, certainly, to cause the kind of head injury that could kill a seventy-five-year-old woman who'd lived through enough to survive everything except this one moment of losing her balance.

"Straightforward accident, Lieutenant," Murphy said, consulting his notes. "Victim was alone in the apartment. No signs of forced entry, no evidence of struggle. Neighbor across the hall heard a crash around three in the afternoon, but didn't think much of it. Old people drop things."

Columbo nodded absently, but his attention had shifted to the tea service still arranged on the low table in the living room. Two cups, he noticed. Two delicate porcelain cups with a matching pot, sugar bowl, and what looked like a plate for small cakes. The kind of setup his wife would call "proper," though this had an elegance that made their own kitchen seem suddenly inadequate.

"Murphy, you said she was alone when this happened?"

"That's right."

"But she had two teacups out."

Murphy glanced over, shrugged. "Maybe she was expecting someone. Or maybe old people just do things different."

The explanation sat wrong with Columbo in a way he couldn't quite explain. He knelt beside the table, studying the arrangement without touching anything. One cup showed the faint ring of tea residue, as if it had been used and not yet washed. The other was pristine, unused, but positioned as if someone had been expected to sit there.

"Did anyone ask the neighbors if they saw visitors yesterday?"

"We'll get to it, Lieutenant. But with the Saito kid already booked, and that money..."

Columbo straightened slowly, his knees protesting in the way that reminded him he wasn't getting any younger. Something about Murphy's certainty bothered him almost as much as the perfectly set tea service. In his experience, cases that looked this obvious usually had at least one detail that didn't quite fit. The problem was finding it before everyone else decided they'd already found everything that mattered.

He wandered into the kitchen, where the ceramic pot sat on its shelf like a patient sentinel. The bonsai tree looked healthy, well-tended, its small branches arranged with the same careful attention to detail that marked everything else in the apartment. Columbo had never understood the appeal of miniature trees—seemed like a lot of work to keep something from growing to its natural size—but he could appreciate the dedication it must take.

"The money was hidden in here?" he asked the forensics technician who was dusting the shelf for prints.

"That's what the tenant claims. Says the old lady kept her savings in the bottom of the pot. Smart hiding place, actually. Who's gonna look for cash in a plant?"

Columbo peered at the pot more closely. The ceramic was old but well-maintained, glazed in a deep blue that reminded him of something his wife would admire in a museum gift shop. The soil around the base of the tree looked recently disturbed, though that could mean anything. Maybe Mrs. Tanaka had been tending to her plant. Maybe someone had been looking for hidden money. Maybe a seventy-five-year-old woman had simply lost her balance while watering her bonsai.

"Any prints on the pot?"

"Old lady's, mostly. Some smudges that might be the tenant's, but nothing clear enough to be useful."

"What about the plant itself? Any damage?"

The technician looked puzzled. "Damage? It's a tree, Lieutenant. In a pot."

But Columbo was thinking about something else. If someone had been looking for money hidden in the soil, they would have had to move the tree, disturb the roots, maybe even pull it out entirely. Yet the bonsai looked untouched, its small branches perfectly positioned, its leaves showing no signs of recent handling.

He made a note in his notebook, though he wasn't sure yet what the note meant.

The living room drew him back, specifically the mantelpiece where a single family photograph sat in a place of honor. The picture showed a small child taking tentative steps in what looked like a traditional Japanese garden, cherry blossoms scattered in the background like confetti celebrating this moment of developmental triumph.

"Beautiful photograph," he said to no one in particular.

The forensics photographer glanced over. "Just arrived yesterday, according to the postal receipt we found. Express delivery from Japan. Probably why the old lady was in such a good mood when she had her visitor."

"Visitor?"

"The graduate student who interviewed her. David something. Japanese name. He mentioned he was here yesterday afternoon, working on some college project."

Columbo studied the photograph more carefully. The child couldn't be more than two years old, caught mid-step with the concentration of someone discovering they could navigate the world on their own power. The kind of image that would bring pure joy to a grandmother thousands of miles away from the moment it captured.

"Express delivery," he repeated. "So this just arrived yesterday morning?"

"That's right. According to the receipt, delivery was around ten AM."

Something about the timing bothered Columbo, though he couldn't yet articulate what. He made another note, then found himself drawn back to the tea service, to those two cups that suggested company rather than solitude.

"Murphy, did this David... what was his last name?"

"Fukiya. The one who brought in the money."

"Right. Did he mention what time he visited yesterday?"

Murphy consulted his notes. "Said he was here in the afternoon for about an hour. Academic interview for his thesis."

Columbo nodded slowly, but something was crystallizing in his mind—not a theory, exactly, but a pattern of questions that seemed to be asking themselves. A photograph that arrived in the morning. A visitor who came in the afternoon. Two teacups suggesting a proper visit rather than a quick academic interview. And a woman who ended up dead just hours after receiving what was probably the most joyful piece of mail she'd gotten in months.

He walked back to the kitchen, studying the scene one more time. The corner of the counter where Mrs. Tanaka had supposedly hit her head. The pot where she'd hidden her life savings. The morning light that would have illuminated that new photograph of her great-grandson taking his first steps.

"Lieutenant?" Murphy's voice carried a note of impatience. "We should probably head back. The paperwork on this one's going to take a while, and with Saito already downtown..."

"Just one more minute," Columbo said, though he wasn't sure what he was looking for in that one more minute.

Sometimes the most important details were the ones that seemed too small to matter. Sometimes the thing that bothered you about a crime scene was exactly the thing that would eventually solve the case. And sometimes, Columbo had learned over twenty years of police work, the most obvious explanation was just the story someone wanted you to believe.

He made one final note in his notebook, closed it, and followed Murphy toward the door. But as they left Mrs. Tanaka's carefully arranged world behind, Columbo found himself thinking about tea ceremonies and express deliveries and the kind of joy that could make a seventy-five-year-old woman want to share her happiness with a visitor who claimed to be interested in her life story.

Some stories, he reflected as they walked back into the afternoon light of Little Tokyo, were worth investigating a little more carefully.

Chapter 6

The interrogation room at downtown headquarters had the particular atmosphere of a place where truth and lies got sorted out under fluorescent lights that made everyone look guilty of something. James Saito sat hunched over the metal table, his hands wrapped around a paper cup of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. Everything about him radiated exhaustion—the kind that came from working three jobs while trying to finish a graduate degree, but also something deeper now. The exhaustion of someone whose life had just collapsed in ways he couldn't begin to understand.

Columbo entered quietly, carrying a manila folder and wearing the expression he reserved for witnesses who might be more complicated than they appeared. He'd read Saito's initial statement twice, and something about it bothered him in the same way Mrs. Tanaka's tea service had bothered him—not because it was obviously wrong, but because it felt incomplete.

"Mr. Saito? I'm Lieutenant Columbo. Sorry to keep you waiting."

Saito looked up with the kind of hope that came from assuming anyone new might be someone who would finally understand. His eyes were red-rimmed, either from crying or from staying awake too long, and when he spoke his voice carried the careful precision of someone trying very hard to be believed.

"Lieutenant, I know how this looks. I know finding me with the money makes me seem guilty, but I swear I didn't hurt Mrs. Tanaka. She was... she was like a grandmother to me."

Columbo settled into the chair across from him, opening the folder but not immediately looking at it. Instead, he studied Saito's face with the kind of attention that made people either confess everything or realize they were talking to someone who actually cared about getting things right.

"Tell me about this morning. In your own words. Take your time."

Saito's hands trembled slightly as he set down the coffee cup. "I went to see her around nine AM. I was behind on rent—have been for two months—and I knew she was getting frustrated. Mrs. Tanaka was patient, but she wasn't wealthy. She needed the income from her tenants."

"Nine AM," Columbo repeated, making a note. "That's pretty early for a rent conversation."

"I work evenings at the library, mornings at the campus bookstore. Nine was the only time I could catch her before she started her daily routine." Saito's voice carried the exhaustion of someone whose schedule was measured in fifteen-minute increments. "I was hoping maybe we could work out a payment plan, or I could do some repairs around the building to make up for what I owed."

"And when you got there?"

"I knocked, but no one answered. The door was unlocked, which was weird because Mrs. Tanaka always kept it locked during the day. I called out, but..." He stopped, his hands clenching into fists. "I found her in the kitchen. There was blood."

Columbo made another note, but his attention was focused on the way Saito's breathing had changed—quicker, shallower, the physical memory of discovering something terrible.

"What did you do then?"

"I checked for a pulse. I know some first aid from my work at the campus health center. But she was... she'd been dead for a while. Her skin was cold." Saito's voice dropped almost to a whisper. "I should have called the police immediately. I know that. But Lieutenant, I haven't eaten a real meal in three days. I've been living on vending machine food and whatever free samples they give out at the grocery store."

Columbo nodded slowly. He'd seen desperation before, knew the way it could make good people make bad choices in moments when survival instinct overrode better judgment.

"What happened next?"

Saito's face crumpled with shame. "I remembered the money. I knew she kept cash hidden in that ceramic pot with the bonsai tree. And I thought... I thought maybe I could take just enough to cover rent, to buy groceries. I told myself she would have wanted me to have it rather than let whoever killed her get everything."

"So you disturbed the pot."

"Yes. I moved the tree, found the money wrapped in cloth at the bottom. There was so much more than I expected—thousands of dollars. I took about half, maybe three thousand." Saito looked directly at Columbo, his eyes carrying a desperate kind of honesty. "I know how that looks. I know taking money from a dead woman makes me look like I killed her for it. But I swear, Lieutenant, she was already dead when I got there."

"And then?"

"Then I called 911. Waited for the police. When they found the money on me..." He shrugged helplessly. "How do you explain that you stole from a dead woman without sounding like you killed her for it?"

Columbo closed the folder and leaned back in his chair. Something about Saito's story rang true—not because it was particularly believable, but because it was exactly the kind of stupid, desperate decision that innocent people made when they panicked. Guilty people usually had better explanations.

"Mr. Saito, I have to ask you this. Did you kill Mrs. Tanaka?"

"No." The word came out immediately, without hesitation or calculation. "Lieutenant, she was the only person in my life who treated me like family. When I got food poisoning last month, she brought me soup. When my parents stopped sending money, she let me slide on rent for two months without making me feel like a charity case. I would never hurt her."

"But you did take her money."

Saito's face crumpled. "Yes. I took her money. And I'll regret that for the rest of my life. But I didn't kill her."

Columbo studied the young man across from him—the exhaustion, the genuine grief, the way shame and desperation had twisted together into something that looked like guilt but felt like something else entirely. In his experience, people who committed murder for money didn't usually break down crying when they talked about their victims' kindness.

"Tell me about yesterday afternoon. Mrs. Tanaka had a visitor, we think. Someone doing an interview for a college project."

"Oh, that was David. David Fukiya. He's in my program at UCLA." Saito wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "Smart guy. Really smart. He mentioned wanting to interview some Japanese-American families for his dissertation research, and I suggested Mrs. Tanaka. She would have loved talking about her experiences, her family."

"You know this David well?"

"Well enough. We've had classes together, study sessions. He's the kind of guy who always seems to have everything figured out, you know? Never stressed about money or grades or any of the stuff that keeps the rest of us awake at night."

Something in Saito's tone made Columbo look up from his notes. Not resentment, exactly, but a kind of weary recognition of the distance between people who had to worry about eating and people who could focus on academic pursuits without distraction.

"Did you tell him about Mrs. Tanaka's... financial habits?"

Saito's face went pale. "What do you mean?"

"The money in the plant pot. Did David know about that?"

The silence that followed was answer enough. Saito's hands started shaking again, and Columbo could see the exact moment when a young man realized he might have contributed to the death of someone he cared about.

"I... we were talking about financial stress. About how hard it was to make rent. I might have mentioned that Mrs. Tanaka kept cash around the house instead of using banks." Saito's voice was barely audible. "Oh God. Did I... did my talking about money get her killed?"

Columbo reached across the table and put his hand on Saito's arm—not the gesture of a cop to a suspect, but the comfort one human being offered another.

"Mr. Saito, people make choices. You didn't make anyone else's choices for them."

But even as he said it, Columbo was thinking about David Fukiya. About helpful citizens who arrived at crime scenes with evidence. About psychology students who understood exactly how desperate people behaved when they were pushed to their breaking points.

About the kind of intelligence that could turn one person's desperation into another person's perfect alibi.

Chapter 7

David Fukiya arrived at the police station with the punctuality of someone who understood that being precisely on time conveyed both respect for authority and confidence in one's own innocence. He wore a charcoal blazer over dark jeans—the kind of calculated casual that suggested academic seriousness without appearing overdressed for a police station. In his hand, he carried a leather portfolio that looked expensive enough to signal success but not so flashy as to seem inappropriate for the circumstances.

Columbo met him in the lobby, looking rumpled and slightly apologetic in the way that made people assume he was probably in over his head with whatever case he was working.

"Mr. Fukiya? Thanks for coming down. I know this is probably an inconvenience."

"Not at all, Lieutenant. Anything I can do to help." Fukiya's smile was warm but appropriately subdued, the expression of someone who understood the gravity of the situation while remaining optimistic about civic duty. "I assume this is just routine paperwork about the money I found?"

"Right, right. Just crossing the t's, dotting the i's. You know how it is." Columbo gestured toward the elevator with the slightly befuddled air of someone who spent most of his time apologizing for bureaucracy. "We'll try to make this as quick as possible."

As they rode up to the third floor, Fukiya maintained the perfect balance of concern and composure. Not too relaxed—that might suggest he didn't care about Mrs. Tanaka's death. Not too nervous—that might suggest he had something to hide. Just the right amount of solemn civic engagement that marked someone doing their duty in difficult circumstances.

The interview room was different from the one where Saito had been questioned—smaller, more informal, with actual chairs instead of metal furniture bolted to the floor. The kind of space reserved for cooperative witnesses rather than criminal suspects. Fukiya settled into his seat with the easy confidence of someone accustomed to being believed without question.

"So," Columbo began, consulting a yellow legal pad covered in handwriting that looked more like random notes than organized questions. "You found this money near Mrs... uh..." He squinted at his notes. "Mrs. Ta-NAH-ka's back door?"

"That's right. Though it's pronounced 'Tanaka,' Lieutenant. Like 'ta-NA-ka.'" Fukiya's correction was gentle, educational rather than condescending. "I came by this morning to check on her after seeing all the police cars, and I noticed cash scattered near her back entrance. Obviously, I thought it was too important to leave lying around."

"Obviously." Columbo made a note that seemed to take longer than necessary. "And this was because you'd interviewed her yesterday? For your college project?"

"My doctoral dissertation, yes. I'm researching Japanese-American family structures, how traditional values adapt to American life. Mrs. Tanaka was perfect for my research—first-generation immigrant, maintained strong cultural ties while raising children who became fully integrated into American society."

Fukiya leaned forward slightly, his voice taking on the enthusiasm of someone discussing work they genuinely cared about. "She was such a fascinating subject. Sharp as a tack despite her age, full of stories about the internment camps, about rebuilding after the war. The kind of primary source material that makes academic research really sing."

"Sounds like you spent quite a bit of time with her."

"About an hour and a half. She insisted on the full tea ceremony—proper service, the whole cultural experience. It was actually wonderful research into how these traditions persist even in immigrant families that have been here for decades."

Columbo nodded appreciatively, though something in his expression suggested he was having trouble following the academic terminology. "Tea ceremony. That's... that's like a formal thing?"

"Very formal. Everything has meaning—the way the tea is prepared, how it's served, even how you hold the cup. Mrs. Tanaka took it very seriously. She'd obviously maintained those traditions her entire life." Fukiya's tone carried just the right mixture of respect and scholarly interest. "It's exactly the kind of cultural persistence I'm documenting in my dissertation."

"Interesting." Columbo made another note. "So she would have set out the good cups? Made it special?"

"Absolutely. She used her finest porcelain service, arranged everything perfectly. You could tell she was proud to share her culture with someone who would appreciate its significance."

Something flickered in Columbo's eyes—not suspicion, exactly, but the kind of attention he paid when details started connecting in ways that felt important. "Her finest porcelain. So there would have been two cups?"

"Of course. One for each of us. That's fundamental to the ceremony."

"Right, right." Columbo seemed to be making an effort to understand cultural nuances that were clearly beyond his usual experience. "And this was yesterday afternoon?"

Fukiya's response came without hesitation, smooth and confident. "Oh, I should clarify something, Lieutenant. When I said I interviewed Mrs. Tanaka yesterday, I misspoke. The interview was actually the day before yesterday—Tuesday afternoon. Yesterday I was on campus all day, attending seminars and working in the library. I have witnesses who can confirm that."

Columbo looked up from his legal pad with the expression of someone trying to keep a timeline straight. "The day before yesterday. So... Tuesday."

"That's right. I realize the confusion—when I saw the police cars yesterday and came forward with the money, I was thinking about my most recent contact with Mrs. Tanaka, which was the interview on Tuesday."

"I see. So you weren't at the boarding house at all on Wednesday."

"No, not at all. I was quite busy with academic commitments." Fukiya's tone carried the slight superiority of someone correcting a misunderstanding while being patient about it. "I suppose in the shock of learning about Mrs. Tanaka's death, I wasn't as precise as I should have been about the timing."

Columbo made a careful note, underlining something twice. "So the interview was Tuesday. About what time?"

"Around two-thirty in the afternoon. Same time I mentioned before, just the wrong day."

"Right, right. And this was for your college project."

"My doctoral dissertation, yes. Japanese-American family structures. Mrs. Tanaka was an ideal subject—very forthcoming about her experiences, eager to share her cultural traditions."

Fukiya settled back in his chair with the relaxed confidence of someone who had just clarified an important point in his favor. His new timeline put him nowhere near the scene on the day of the murder, backed up by academic witnesses who could verify his whereabouts.

"You know," he continued, warming to his subject, "this wasn't actually my first time meeting Mrs. Tanaka. I'd visited the boarding house several times before with James Saito. We're good friends from the graduate program, and I'd often walk him home after study sessions. Mrs. Tanaka took a real liking to both of us—treated us like the grandsons she never had in America."

"She was friendly to you boys."

"Very friendly. She'd always invite us in for tea, insist on feeding us. And she loved talking about her family—she was so proud of her children and grandchildren back in Japan. Always showing off photographs, telling us stories about their accomplishments."

Fukiya's voice took on the warm tone of someone recounting fond memories. "She had this beautiful photograph on her mantelpiece—her great-grandson taking his first steps in his grandmother's garden. Cherry blossoms in the background, the little boy with his arms out for balance. She must have shown us that picture a dozen times, always with the same pride, the same joy. 'First steps, little Kenji,' she'd say. 'Soon he run everywhere, like his grandfather.'"

He paused, his expression growing more serious. "That's what makes this so tragic, Lieutenant. She was such a gentle soul, so full of love for her family. The idea that someone would hurt her..."

Columbo had stopped writing entirely and was staring at Fukiya with an intensity that seemed to have appeared from nowhere. The bumbling confusion was gone, replaced by something sharper, more focused.

"This photograph," Columbo said slowly. "The one of the little boy taking his first steps. You said she showed it to you many times?"

"Oh yes. Whenever James and I would visit, she'd point it out. It was clearly one of her most treasured possessions."

"And the last time you saw this photograph was...?"

"Tuesday afternoon, during our interview. She was just as proud of it as ever, talking about how Kenji was going to be running everywhere soon." Fukiya smiled at the memory. "Some things never change. A grandmother's love is the same in any culture."

Columbo closed his legal pad very carefully and set it on the table. When he looked up, his eyes held something that hadn't been there moments before—not confusion, not the slightly overwhelmed expression of someone trying to navigate cultural differences, but the quiet certainty of someone who had just watched a suspect hang himself.

Chapter 8

The UCLA campus coffee shop hummed with the particular energy of graduate students caffeinating themselves through another day of academic anxiety. David Fukiya sat at his usual table by the window, a spread of psychology journals arranged before him like a shield of scholarly legitimacy. He'd chosen this spot carefully—visible enough to establish his normal routine, positioned so he could see anyone approaching, close enough to other tables that any conversation would have witnesses to his calm, cooperative demeanor.

Three days had passed since his interview at the police station, and Fukiya allowed himself the quiet satisfaction of someone who had successfully navigated a dangerous situation. The news that morning had been encouraging: James Saito remained in custody, the physical evidence against him overwhelming. The case was proceeding exactly as Fukiya had planned—a desperate graduate student, caught with stolen money at the scene of a crime, no credible explanation for his actions.

He was annotating an article about impulse control disorders when a familiar voice interrupted his concentration.

"Excuse me... Mr. Fukiya?"

Fukiya looked up to see Lieutenant Columbo standing beside his table, looking slightly lost and holding a coffee shop menu like it was written in hieroglyphics. The detective appeared even more rumpled than he had at the police station, his raincoat wrinkled and his expression carrying the particular bewilderment of someone who'd wandered into unfamiliar territory.

"Lieutenant Columbo!" Fukiya arranged his features into an expression of pleased surprise. "What a coincidence. Are you... investigating something here on campus?"

"Oh, no, no. Nothing like that." Columbo gestured vaguely at the menu. "I was in the neighborhood, thought I'd grab a cup of coffee. But this place..." He squinted at the list of options. "They got about fifteen different kinds of coffee here. Macchiato, cappuccino... what's a 'flat white'? Sounds like something you'd order at a paint store."

Fukiya smiled with the patience of someone accustomed to explaining complex concepts to those less sophisticated. "It's an espresso-based drink. Similar to a cappuccino but with less foam. Originally from Australia, I believe."

"Australia. Huh." Columbo continued studying the menu with intense concentration. "You know what? Maybe you could help me out. You seem like someone who knows about... cultural things. What would you recommend for someone who usually just drinks regular coffee? Black, no sugar?"

The request was so reasonable, so perfectly in line with Fukiya's established role as helpful witness, that refusing would seem suspicious. "The house blend is quite good. Similar to what you'd get at a diner, just higher quality beans."

"Perfect. Thank you." Columbo shuffled toward the counter, then paused and turned back. "You mind if I sit for a minute when I get my coffee? I wanted to ask you something about Japanese customs. Professional curiosity."

Again, perfectly reasonable. Fukiya gestured to the empty chair across from him. "Of course, Lieutenant. Though I should mention, I'm Japanese-American. Third generation. My knowledge of traditional customs is somewhat limited."

"Right, right. But still more than mine, I bet."

While Columbo ordered his coffee—a process that seemed to involve considerable confusion about sizes and an extended discussion with the barista about whether "tall" really meant small—Fukiya organized his thoughts. Whatever the detective wanted to discuss, it would be important to maintain his helpful, cooperative persona while revealing nothing that could compromise his position.

Columbo returned with a large cup of black coffee and settled into the chair with the careful movements of someone whose knees complained about small furniture. He took a sip, made an appreciative sound, then pulled out his ever-present notebook.

"So here's what's bothering me," he began, flipping through pages covered with handwriting that looked more like random observations than organized investigation notes. "This Mrs. Ta-NA-ka case. I keep feeling like I'm missing something about the cultural side of things."

"How so?"

"Well, take this tea ceremony business. You mentioned she did the whole formal thing when you interviewed her. Two cups, special service, the works." Columbo looked up from his notes with genuine curiosity. "My wife, she's always on me about cultural sensitivity. Made me read this whole book about Japanese tea ceremonies after I told her about this case. 'You need to understand what you're looking at,' she says. Smart woman, my wife."

Fukiya nodded appropriately, though something about the detective's rambling approach made him slightly uneasy. There was no clear direction to the conversation, no obvious investigative purpose. Just a man trying to understand customs that were foreign to him.

"The thing is," Columbo continued, "according to this book my wife gave me, the tea ceremony's not just about drinking tea. It's about respect, hospitality, making your guest feel honored. That sound right to you?"

"Absolutely. Even in Japanese-American families that have been here for generations, those values persist. Mrs. Tanaka would have wanted to show proper respect for someone taking an interest in her life story."

"Right, right. So she would have taken time with it. Made it special." Columbo made a note, then looked up with the expression of someone working through a puzzle. "But here's what I can't figure out. If someone was just dropping by to rob her, would she have set out the good china?"

The question hung in the air with more weight than its casual delivery suggested. Fukiya felt the first flutter of unease, though he kept his expression thoughtfully academic.

"I'm not sure I follow, Lieutenant."

"Well, see, when we found Mrs. Tanaka, she had that tea service all set up. Two cups, like she was expecting company. But if someone just knocked on her door and forced their way in, would she have had time to arrange all that? And why would a robber let her go through a whole tea ceremony before..."

Columbo gestured vaguely, leaving the rest unspoken.

"Perhaps she was expecting a different visitor?" Fukiya suggested. "Someone she knew?"

"That's what I'm thinking. Someone she trusted enough to invite in, to serve tea to." Columbo took another sip of his coffee, his eyes never leaving Fukiya's face. "Someone who knew enough about her customs to appreciate the gesture."

The implication was subtle but unmistakable. Fukiya forced himself to maintain academic detachment, as if they were discussing a theoretical case rather than something that could destroy his life.

"That would certainly fit the evidence better than a random robbery," he agreed.

"Exactly. See, this is why I wanted to talk to you. You understand these cultural nuances." Columbo flipped to a new page in his notebook. "Here's another thing that's bothering me. My wife, she says in Japanese culture, family is very important. You agree with that?"

"Family is central to Japanese values, yes."

"So if Mrs. Tanaka had just received a special photograph—say, from relatives in Japan—that would be a big deal for her?"

"Absolutely. She would want to share that joy with anyone she cared about."

"Share it immediately, you mean? Not wait for a special occasion?"

Fukiya hesitated for just a moment, sensing a trap but unable to see its exact shape. "Yes, I think that's accurate. In my experience, elderly Japanese women are very eager to share family news."

Columbo made another note, then closed his notebook and stood up. "Well, Mr. Fukiya, you've been very helpful. Again. I really appreciate you taking the time."

"Of course, Lieutenant. Anything I can do to help solve Mrs. Tanaka's case."

But as Columbo shuffled away, coffee cup in hand, Fukiya found himself staring after the detective with a growing sense of unease. The conversation had seemed random, meandering, the kind of cultural confusion you'd expect from someone out of his depth. But something about it felt more purposeful than it appeared. Like questions that seemed innocent were actually laying groundwork for something larger.

He returned to his psychology journals, but the words swam before his eyes as he replayed every detail of their conversation. Had he said anything compromising? Revealed any knowledge he shouldn't possess?

No, he decided. He'd been careful, helpful but not overly specific. Just a concerned citizen sharing cultural insights with a detective who clearly needed all the help he could get.

But the unease lingered, settling in his stomach like something he'd eaten that disagreed with him. For the first time since Mrs. Tanaka's death, David Fukiya wondered if he might have underestimated the rumpled little man who asked too many questions about things that didn't seem to matter.

Chapter 9

Columbo stood on the sidewalk outside the coffee shop, squinting at the street signs and trying to remember where he'd parked his car. The afternoon light in Little Tokyo had a different quality than the rest of Los Angeles—softer somehow, filtered through the unfamiliar architecture and the hanging signs covered in characters he couldn't read.

He wandered slowly down the block, hands clasped behind his back in the way that meant his mind was working on something just below the surface of consciousness. The smells were different here—something sweet and yeasty from a bakery, the sharp tang of pickled vegetables, the earthy aroma of tea drifting from an open doorway. Even the sounds felt foreign: conversations in rapid Japanese, the clatter of dishes that suggested different kinds of meals than he was used to.

A small elderly woman emerged from a shop carrying a carefully wrapped package, moving with the deliberate precision of someone for whom every errand required proper attention. She reminded him of Mrs. Tanaka, though he'd never met Mrs. Tanaka alive. Still, there was something in the way she held herself, the care she took with small things, that made him think of the tidy apartment where two teacups had been set out for company that never came.

Or maybe company that did come, but not the kind Mrs. Tanaka had been expecting.

The postal truck turned the corner just as Columbo was passing a shop window filled with delicate porcelain tea sets. The familiar white and blue vehicle looked oddly out of place among the Japanese signage, but the driver navigated the narrow street with the confidence of someone who'd made this route many times before.

Columbo paused, watching as the truck pulled up to a small building across the street. The driver emerged with a package, checked the address, then approached the door with the brisk efficiency of someone who made dozens of such deliveries every day.

"Oh, that's right," Columbo murmured to himself.

The postal receipt. Express delivery from Japan, signed for at... what time was it? Ten something in the morning. He'd have to check his notes, but the important thing was the timing. Mrs. Tanaka had received that photograph the morning she died. And if Fukiya's interview was the day before, like he'd claimed...

Columbo pulled out his notebook and flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for. There it was, in his own handwriting: "Photo arrived Wednesday AM - express delivery."

He watched the postal worker return to his truck, package delivered, another small moment of connection between family members separated by an ocean. For Mrs. Tanaka, that delivery would have been the highlight of her day. Little Kenji taking his first steps, cherry blossoms in the background, the kind of joy that a grandmother would want to share with anyone who walked through her door.

The kind of detail that someone would remember very clearly if they'd actually been there to see it.

Columbo closed his notebook and looked around until he spotted his car, parked beneath a sign he couldn't read but that probably said something about no parking.

Chapter 10

The Psychology Department's graduate student offices occupied the basement level of the building, a warren of converted storage rooms that the university had optimistically relabeled as "academic workspace." David Fukiya's office was barely large enough for a desk, two chairs, and the institutional bookshelf that held his research materials and a small collection of academic journals. A hand-lettered sign on the door read "D. Fukiya - Office Hours: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2-4 PM."

It was Thursday afternoon, and Fukiya was reviewing an undergraduate's paper on behavioral conditioning when he heard the distinctive shuffle of footsteps in the hallway. Through his open door, he watched Lieutenant Columbo approach, consulting a piece of paper and checking door numbers with the careful attention of someone navigating unfamiliar territory.

"Mr. Fukiya?" Columbo appeared in the doorway, looking slightly apologetic. "I hope I'm not interrupting. Your department secretary said these were your office hours."

Fukiya set down the paper he'd been grading, arranging his features into an expression of helpful professionalism. "Of course, Lieutenant. Please, come in. Though I should warn you, the accommodations are a bit... modest."

"Oh, this is fine. Reminds me of my first desk at the precinct." Columbo settled into the student chair across from Fukiya's desk, pulling out his notebook and a manila envelope. "I wanted to follow up on our conversation the other day. I've got this one detail that's been bothering me, and I was hoping you could help me understand it."

The request was perfectly reasonable—exactly the kind of community outreach that graduate students were encouraged to provide. Fukiya opened his hands in a gesture of availability.

"I'm happy to help however I can."

Columbo opened the envelope and withdrew a single photograph, placing it carefully on the desk between them. It was a crime scene image showing Mrs. Tanaka's living room, with the mantelpiece clearly visible in the background. There, in its place of honor, sat the photograph of little Kenji taking his first steps.

"This is from Mrs. Tanaka's apartment," Columbo said. "Now, when we talked at the coffee shop, you mentioned this family photograph. Described it in pretty good detail—little boy in a garden, cherry blossoms, taking his first steps."

Fukiya glanced at the crime scene photo, his mouth feeling suddenly dry. "Yes, I remember mentioning it."

"Right, right. And you said your interview with Mrs. Tanaka was on Tuesday afternoon."

"That's correct."

Columbo reached into the envelope again and withdrew a postal receipt, placing it next to the photograph. "Well, here's what's got me confused. We spoke to the man who delivered this photograph - the one who asked Mrs. Tanaka to sign for the delivery of it. And he said something very interesting. He sa-"

A knock at the door interrupted the moment. A young undergraduate peered in, clutching a paper.

"Professor Fukiya? I have questions about the essay assignment..."

Fukiya nearly sagged with relief. "Of course! Come in. Lieutenant, I'm sorry, but I do have office hours to maintain."

"Oh, of course, of course," Columbo said, starting to gather the evidence from the desk. "I don't want to keep you from your students."

But as he slipped the postal receipt back into the envelope, he paused.

"You know, Mr. Fukiya, I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. Maybe we could talk again soon? When you have more time to think it through?"

The words were polite, even considerate, but they carried an undertone that made Fukiya's chest tighten. Not a threat, exactly, but a promise. This conversation wasn't over.

"Yes," Fukiya managed. "Yes, of course. Anytime, Lieutenant."

"Great. I'll be in touch."

As Columbo shuffled out of the office, the undergraduate student settled into the chair he'd vacated, spreading her paper across the desk. But Fukiya barely heard her questions about thesis statements and citation formats. His mind was racing, replaying every detail of the conversation, analyzing what the detective knew and what he might still be able to explain away.

There had to be a reasonable explanation. Something scientific, psychological, that would make sense of the apparent contradiction. He was a graduate student in psychology, for God's sake. If anyone could understand the complexities of human memory and perception, it was him.

The student was still talking, but Fukiya found himself nodding absently, his thoughts already turning toward his textbooks, toward research that might provide the key to explaining away this troubling discrepancy.

He just needed time to think. Time to prepare.

Time to find the perfect psychological explanation for why he'd described a photograph that hadn't existed when he claimed to have seen it.

Chapter 10

Lieutenant Columbo was reviewing case files at his desk when the call came through. The desk sergeant's voice carried a note of amusement that suggested he was enjoying whatever message he was about to deliver.

"Lieutenant? Got a David Fukiya on line two. Says he has some important information about the Tanaka case. Wants to set up a meeting to 'clarify some psychological principles' that might help with your investigation."

Columbo leaned back in his chair, a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "Is that right? Did he say when he wanted to meet?"

"This afternoon, if possible. Says he's been doing some research and thinks he can clear up that confusion you mentioned."

"Tell Mr. Fukiya I'd be delighted to hear what he's discovered. How about three o'clock?"

Two hours later, David Fukiya arrived at the police station carrying a leather briefcase and wearing his most professional blazer. He moved with the confident stride of someone who had spent considerable time preparing for this moment, someone who had found the perfect solution to an apparently impossible problem.

Columbo met him at the front desk, looking as rumpled as ever but with an expression of genuine curiosity.

"Mr. Fukiya! This is very generous of you, taking time out of your schedule to help with our investigation."

"Not at all, Lieutenant. I believe I can shed some light on that apparent discrepancy we discussed." Fukiya's voice carried the calm authority of someone accustomed to explaining complex concepts to those less educated. "Is there somewhere we could talk privately?"

"Of course, of course. Conference room's free."

The conference room was small and institutional, with a metal table and uncomfortable chairs that had seen decades of police business. Fukiya arranged himself at one end, opened his briefcase, and withdrew a small stack of papers with the ceremony of someone presenting academic credentials.

"Lieutenant, I've given considerable thought to our conversation about the family photograph, and I believe what we're dealing with is a fascinating example of retroactive memory construction."

Columbo settled into his chair, pulling out his notebook with the eager attention of someone about to receive valuable education. "Retroactive memory construction. That sounds complicated."

"It's actually quite elegant once you understand the underlying mechanisms." Fukiya consulted his notes, warming to his subject. "You see, human memory isn't like a recording device. It's a reconstructive process that can be influenced by subsequent experiences and emotional associations."

"Uh huh." Columbo wrote something down. "So you're saying people can remember things that didn't actually happen?"

"Not exactly. What happens is that genuine memory fragments combine with later information to create what feels like a complete, accurate recollection." Fukiya leaned forward, his voice taking on the enthusiasm of someone sharing a particularly brilliant insight. "In my case, I had genuine memories of visiting Mrs. Tanaka, of her showing me family photographs, of her pride in her relatives in Japan."

"Right."

"Then, when I heard about her death and learned that she'd recently received a new family photograph, my mind unconsciously integrated that information with my existing memories. The result was a composite recollection that felt completely authentic but was actually a synthesis of real experience and learned details."

Columbo nodded slowly, as if trying to follow the logic. "So you're saying your brain kind of... mixed up different memories?"

"Precisely! It's a well-documented phenomenon in the psychological literature." Fukiya consulted another paper. "Loftus and Palmer demonstrated as early as 1974 that post-event information can fundamentally alter eyewitness recollections. What I experienced was a textbook case of memory contamination through retroactive interference."

"That's fascinating. Really fascinating." Columbo made more notes. "So when you described that photograph to me—the little boy, the cherry blossoms, even his name..."

"All genuine details that I learned after the fact and unconsciously incorporated into my pre-existing memory structure. It's actually quite remarkable how seamlessly the human mind can weave disparate information into a coherent narrative that feels historically accurate."

Fukiya was clearly pleased with his explanation, sitting back in his chair with the satisfaction of someone who had successfully applied academic knowledge to solve a real-world problem.

"You know," he continued, "this case could actually make an excellent study for my dissertation. The intersection of grief psychology, memory formation, and investigative methodology. With your permission, of course, I'd love to document this as an example of how psychological principles can assist law enforcement in understanding apparent inconsistencies in witness testimony."

Columbo closed his notebook and looked at Fukiya with what appeared to be genuine admiration. "Mr. Fukiya, that's really something. The way you explained all that psychology stuff... very impressive. You obviously know a lot more about how the mind works than I do."

"Well, it is my field of study."

"Right, right. And this retroactive... what did you call it?"

"Retroactive memory construction."

"That's it. So this explains how you could remember seeing a photograph that you never actually saw because your brain mixed up old memories with new information."

"Exactly."

"That makes perfect sense." Columbo reopened his notebook and flipped through several pages. "It's just... well, there's one small thing that's still bothering me."

Fukiya's expression remained confident, but something in his posture suggested a slight increase in attention. "What's that, Lieutenant?"

Columbo pulled out the familiar manila envelope and withdrew the postal receipt, placing it on the table between them with the same careful precision he'd used in Fukiya's office.

"This delivery receipt. It shows that the photograph was delivered at exactly 10:17 AM on Wednesday morning."

The conference room fell silent except for the distant sounds of police station activity filtering through the walls.

"Now, you said your interview with Mrs. Tanaka was on Tuesday afternoon, right?"

"That's correct."

"So even with all that psychological stuff you just explained—the memory construction and the retroactive interference—you'd still need to have learned about that photograph somehow, wouldn't you? To mix it into your memories later?"

Fukiya's confident expression was beginning to show small cracks around the edges. "I... well, yes, theoretically..."

"Because according to this receipt, that photograph was delivered the morning Mrs. Tanaka was killed. Which means the only way you could have learned about it—seen the little boy taking his first steps, noticed the cherry blossoms, heard his name was Kenji—would be if someone told you about it afterward."

Columbo paused, his eyes never leaving Fukiya's face.

"Or if you were there when it arrived."

The silence that followed seemed to echo in the small room. Fukiya opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. All of his carefully prepared psychological explanations had suddenly become irrelevant in the face of simple chronology.

"But Mr. Fukiya," Columbo continued gently, "nobody else knew about that photograph. Mrs. Tanaka lived alone. She didn't have time to tell anyone about it before she was killed."

Fukiya's hands had begun to tremble slightly, and all the academic confidence had drained from his voice when he finally spoke.

"I... I think I need to call a lawyer."

Columbo nodded, as if he'd been expecting this response. "I think that's probably a very good idea."

[tamesg]

Player One

It started with a sentence.

“What if I’m not scared this time?”

Mario didn’t react at first. He thought Luigi was doing a warm-up bit. Maybe trying out new line reads.

But then he turned.

Peach’s hands had stopped mid-pose. Bowser wasn’t laughing anymore.

And Luigi—Luigi was looking around like he’d just dropped something very fragile and wasn’t sure if it had broken.

Oh. This was real.

Mario had been reaching into the prop box for the banana peel—stage banana, foam, comically bruised—but now his hand just… stayed there. In the foam. Like maybe holding fruit was safer than holding eye contact.

“I mean,” Luigi said, “what if, for once, I don’t cower behind you while you save the day? What if I actually do something useful?”

Mario blinked.

His brain was still in rehearsal mode. Blocking. Props. Fruit-based hazard timing.

“But… you’re really good at the scared thing,” he offered, half-smiling. Like it was a compliment.

It wasn’t. He could feel it the second he said it.

Luigi peeled at his coffee cup like it was a sticker he regretted applying. “I’m good at a lot of things, Mario.”

And he was.

The thing was—Mario knew that. He’d just never said it out loud. Or thought he needed to.

Luigi stood. His long, crane-legged frame unfolded like a warning flag. He was always awkward on stage until the scene kicked in. But this wasn’t a scene.

“I’m tired of being the comic relief,” Luigi said. “I’m tired of getting captured by ghost dogs. I’m tired of every idea ending with you being the hero and me hiding in a barrel.”

Mario’s mouth opened, but it was all air. Nothing useful.

Toad tried instead. “Luigi, maybe we should—”

“Should what, Toad?”

The lid popped off the coffee cup. Rolled. Nobody chased it.

Mario watched it spin to a stop beneath a folding chair. He didn’t know how to steer the room back to where it had been.

Luigi wasn’t yelling. That was the worst part. He was just… talking. Like he’d been waiting for someone to ask him a question that never came, so he finally answered it himself.

He even paused at one point. Checked in with the tone.

“That sounded more dramatic than I meant it to.”

Then added, flatly:

“But I stand by it.”

From the hallway: a voice.

“Are we still meeting at—oh.”

Daisy peeked her head in, made a sound like “mmnnkay,” and closed the door.

Peach tried to wade in.

“Luigi, I think what Mario means is—”

“I know what he means.”

Mario winced.

Because he had meant it, kind of. Not cruelly. Just… practically. Luigi was good at being scared. That was the dynamic. That was the shape of things.

But maybe—just maybe—he’d mistaken being “good at something” for wanting to do it forever.

���Hey, bro, like—” he started.

But Luigi was past the point of edits.

“And another thing.”

And off he went.

The party games. The haunted house levels. The cereal.

Mario hadn’t known the cereal was still a thing.

He thought it was a fun tie-in. There were marshmallow power-ups. He’d signed boxes. A child once cried.

Luigi’s tone didn’t change much. But the words kept adding up like a score ticking in the background of a level you didn’t realize you were losing.

Peach raised her hands gently. “Okay. I think we all need to take a step back—”

“Step back?” Luigi let out a laugh with sharp corners. “I’ve been stepping back for fifteen years, Peach. If that is your real name, Princess Toadstool. I’ve stepped back so far I’m practically in the parking lot.”

Wario bumped Waluigi with his elbow. Waluigi bumped him back. They looked like they were enjoying the show, but only because they knew they weren’t the target.

And then Mario, in a desperate attempt to connect, fix, do something, opened his mouth and said:

“Luigi, I had no idea you felt this way about the cereal thing! I can totally talk to marketing about getting you moved up from the back panel. Maybe we do, like, a two-box set? Mario Cereal and Luigi Cereal?”

And then the silence.

The kind of silence you get when the boss music starts and you realize you’ve only got one heart left.

Luigi stared.

“Mario.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s not… that’s not the point.”

“Oh.”

Mario nodded. Like someone trying to nod their way out of a fire.

None of this was the point. He knew that. But when you’re Mario, you fix things. You jump on them, or under them, or you throw a shell at them until they disappear.

Luigi started pacing. Around the room. Around all of it.

He passed the whiteboard. The props. The half-eaten power-up mushroom someone had left on a stool. He talked as he walked.

He didn’t say he was angry. He said he cared. Maybe more than anyone.

And that—that—was the part that hit Mario right in the chest. Because it was true.

Luigi wasn’t second-best. He was first-to-arrive, last-to-leave. Quietly brilliant. Stupidly generous. The one who remembered everyone’s birthday, even the Lakitus.

He said he jumped higher. Mario knew that too. He just never said it out loud.

Luigi paused. Looked at everyone. Looked at him.

“And yes. I know I’m spiraling. I hear myself.”

He smiled. Barely. A glitch of a smile.

“But I’m also nicer than all of you.”

He said it like it was fact. Like something that had been tested in a lab.

And it kind of had.

Luigi sat down again. The chair creaked in sympathy.

Silence returned.

Then:

“…That was actually Mario’s coffee.”

Mario didn’t laugh. But he exhaled. He didn’t even realize he’d been holding his breath.

Across the room, Waluigi cleared his throat. Not a fake cough. Just a weird, pointed little noise.

“You want to hang out after rehearsal?”

Mario turned. Surprised.

Luigi blinked. “Like… socially?”

Waluigi shrugged. “I don’t know. You seem like you need a win.”

Luigi looked at him. At the empty coffee spot. At Mario, who was now gently fiddling with the buckle of his overalls like it might solve all of this.

“…Yeah. I do.”

Beat.

Bowser, from the corner: “Can I come?”

Nobody answered.

But nobody said no.

Mario sat there. Holding the banana peel like it was a support animal. Watching his brother. Trying to remember if he’d ever really seen him before today.

[tamesg]

Player Two

“What if I’m not scared this time?”

The rehearsal room stopped.

Mario’s hand froze halfway into the prop box, fingers grazing a foam hammer. Peach held her pose mid-gesture—one gloved hand out, the other frozen at her hip. Even Bowser, in the corner practicing his menacing laugh, turned around slowly like someone had unplugged him.

Luigi looked around. The overhead fluorescents buzzed louder now. In the sudden stillness, someone’s stomach gurgled.

Almost definitely Bowser’s.

Well. It was out there now.

He set his lukewarm coffee down on the floor beside his chair. The Styrofoam squeaked against the tile—just loud enough to feel like betrayal.

“I mean,” Luigi said, trying to keep his voice light, “what if, for once, I don’t cower behind you while you save the day? What if I actually do something useful?”

Mario blinked like his screen had glitched.

“But… you’re really good at the scared thing.”

Luigi peeled a little flap off his cup. “I’m good at a lot of things, Mario.”

And he was.

The mushroom power-up that made you bigger? Luigi’s idea. The fire flower? Also Luigi. The double-jump mechanic? Him. The cereal tie-in? Also him. But because the brand had been locked in since day one—because it was always Super Mario this and Super Mario that—he had become, publicly and contractually, “Mario’s brother.”

Or “the green one.”

Or, when people were feeling generous, “Player Two.”

He looked up.

“Sure, but—”

“No.”

Luigi stood. His knees cracked like bubble wrap. His legs—longer than Mario’s, by the way, precisely 3.74 centimeters longer—had fallen asleep from three hours in that same metal chair.

“I’m tired of being the comic relief,” he said. “I’m tired of getting captured by ghost dogs. I’m tired of every idea ending with you being the hero and me hiding in a barrel.”

Toad fiddled with the edge of his cap. “Luigi, maybe we should—”

“Should what?” Luigi snapped. “Should what, Toad?”

He squeezed the coffee cup until the lid popped off and skittered across the floor, eventually stopping under Toad’s chair.

“Pretend I didn’t say it? Go back to brainstorming another haunted house scene where I scream and you all roll your eyes and Mario swoops in to save me and I look like a moron and Daisy sees it?”

He stopped. A breath.

“That sounded more dramatic than I meant it to.”

A beat.

“But I stand by it.”

From the hallway: a voice. “Are we still meeting at—oh.”

Daisy peeked her head in. Saw the vibe. Immediately retreated.

Peach cleared her throat gently, like maybe if she eased her way into the tension, she could carry it out with her.

“Luigi, I think what Mario means is—”

“I know what he means.”

He turned to Mario, just slightly.

“He means I should stay in my lane. Play my part. Be grateful for the work. Maybe juggle a shell or two if it’s cute.”

He took a breath. Rolled his neck. He hadn’t intended to go further. But something was open now.

“And what if I don’t want to play that part anymore?”

Mario opened his mouth. “Hey, bro, like—”

“And another thing.”

Luigi wasn’t finished. Not even close.

He stepped forward.

“You remember Super Mario 64? Of course you do. What you don’t remember is that I was in it. I had scenes. I did ADR. I signed the release. But then someone—someone who shall remain unnamed but rhymes with Shigeru Miyamoto—decided I wasn’t essential to the narrative arc.”

In the corner, Wario caught Waluigi’s eye.

The look they exchanged wasn’t subtle: Is this happening? Should we leave? Are we witnessing a full unraveling or just a partial one?

Peach tried again. Louder this time.

“Luigi—”

“I’m not finished.”

He spun toward her. Sharp, but not cruel. Just… fed up.

“You want to know what else? The party games.”

Everyone knew what was coming.

“I plan the best parties in this room,” he said. “Hands down. The themes, the food, the guest list balance—me. And yet… what’s it called? Mario Party. I suggest a sports-day theme three years ago and you all laugh. Two weeks later, Mario says the same thing and suddenly it’s ‘brilliant.’”

Peach raised her hands. “Okay. I think we all need to take a step back—”

“Step back?” Luigi laughed. Not a joyful one. The brittle kind. “I’ve been stepping back for fifteen years, Peach. If that is your real name, Princess Toadstool. I’ve stepped back so far I’m practically in the parking lot.”

Wario nudged Waluigi. Waluigi nudged him back. They were both trying very hard not to smile.

Finally, Mario found his voice again.

“Luigi, I had no idea you felt this way about the cereal thing! I can totally talk to marketing about getting you moved up from the back panel. Maybe we do, like, a two-box set? Mario Cereal and Luigi Cereal?”

The silence that followed had shape. Texture. Weight.

Luigi stared.

“Mario.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s not… that’s not the point.”

“Oh.”

Mario looked confused. Like genuinely confused.

“Then what is the point?”

Luigi didn’t answer right away.

He started pacing instead. One slow lap around the rehearsal space. He passed Bowser, passed the whiteboard full of level designs, passed a half-eaten power-up mushroom someone had left on a music stand.

He exhaled through his nose.

“The point,” he said finally, “is that I work just as hard. And I try just as hard. And I care, maybe more than anyone in this room.”

He hesitated.

“I know I’m not the face. I’m not the first choice. That’s fine. I’ve never wanted the spotlight just for the sake of it. But I want to feel like I’m actually in the story. Not just reacting to it.”

He looked up at his brother.

“I jump higher. You know that, right? Like that’s a documented stat. But people don’t even see it. They see red and they go, ‘That’s the hero.’ And then they just assume I’m the guy who falls off the platform.”

He paused.

“And yes. I know I’m spiraling. I hear myself.”

A beat.

“But I’m also nicer than all of you.”

He pointed toward Toad.

“I remember birthdays. I bring snacks to rehearsal. When Toad had that panic attack during the underwater level workshop? Who stayed with him?”

A gesture toward himself.

“But do I get credit? No. I get credit for being supportive. I get credit for being the guy who hands out the credit.”

The air conditioning kicked on. A loud hum filled the space.

No one moved. Even Bowser had stopped breathing loud.

Luigi sat back down. Slowly. The chair creaked under him.

Everything stayed still for a long moment.

Then:

“…That was actually Mario’s coffee.”

No one laughed. But someone exhaled, a little too hard.

A cough. Not real. More like a throat clear.

Waluigi.

“You want to hang out after rehearsal?”

Luigi blinked. “Like… socially?”

Waluigi shrugged. “I don’t know. You seem like you need a win.”

Luigi looked around. At the coffee. At the banana peel. At Mario, who was now very quietly fiddling with the strap on his overalls.

“…Yeah. I do.”

A beat.

Bowser, from the corner: “Can I come?”

Nobody answers.

But nobody says no, either.

[tamesg]

The Potter's Curse

Chapter I: The Discovery

The riverbank curved here in a way that caught the eye—too perfect, as if shaped by intention rather than water's patient work. Kallon knelt at the water's edge, his practiced hands already reading the earth before he touched it. Good clay revealed itself in the way it held moisture, in the particular weight of silence it carried.

But this clay was different.

His fingers found it first in the shallows where the water ran impossibly clear, settling in deposits that seemed to glow faintly in the afternoon light. When he lifted a handful, it did not resist his touch as ordinary clay did. Instead, it seemed to welcome his hands, warm against his palms despite the cool river water.

The texture was wrong—too smooth, too willing. As he worked it between his fingers, testing its give, Kallon felt a strange sensation, as if the clay were working him in return. His fingertips tingled with an awareness that traveled up his arms, a recognition that had nothing to do with his years of experience.

He shaped a small vessel without thinking, his hands moving of their own accord. The clay responded as if it remembered being shaped before, as if it knew the curve of pot and bowl and urn. When he held the rough form up to examine it, water seemed to move beneath its surface—a trick of the light, surely, but one that made his breath catch.

The finished piece, crude as it was, possessed a quality he had never achieved in twenty years of potting. It seemed to hold more than its small volume should allow. When he dipped it into the river to test it, the water it contained looked deeper than the vessel itself, dark and bottomless.

Kallon set the little pot aside and gathered more clay, his movements growing urgent. His hands worked faster than his mind, pulling clay from the riverbank in greedy handfuls. Each scoop felt like discovering treasure, like uncovering something that had been waiting specifically for him.

As the sun lowered, casting long shadows across the water, he finally stopped to examine his harvest. The clay sat in his cart like sleeping flesh, still warm to the touch, still seeming to pulse faintly under his palms. When he pressed his hand into the largest mound, the impression remained for a long moment before slowly, impossibly, smoothing itself away.

He should have been alarmed. Instead, he felt only hunger—for the wheel, for the fire, for the moment when this extraordinary clay would submit to his will and become something beautiful. Something worthy of the tingling that still ran through his hands, the sense that he had finally, after so many years of adequate work, found the material that would make him legendary.

The cart wheels stuck twice on the journey home, as if the clay had grown heavier with the gathering darkness. But Kallon pulled harder, his shoulders burning with effort, because he could still feel that strange warmth radiating from behind him, calling to his hands with a voice he couldn't quite hear but somehow understood perfectly.

That night, he could not sleep. His palms itched. In the darkness, he thought he heard water flowing, though his workshop was nowhere near the river.

Chapter II: The First Work

Kallon's workshop had never felt so alive.

The clay sat before him on the wheel like a breathing thing, still radiating that impossible warmth despite a night spent in his cool stone building. When he wet his hands and pressed them to its surface, the clay seemed to exhale beneath his palms, yielding with an eagerness that made his chest tighten.

He had worked clay for twenty years. He knew its moods—how it resisted when too dry, how it collapsed when too wet, how it demanded patience and coaxing to take the shapes he envisioned. But this clay wanted to be shaped. As his foot found the rhythm on the wheel's pedal, as the clay began to spin, he felt it reaching toward his hands, welcoming his touch with something that felt disturbingly like gratitude.

The vessel rose without effort. His fingers guided the walls upward, and the clay followed as if it remembered being pottery before, as if it knew the ancient dance between earth and hand and flame. The walls grew thin and strong, translucent enough that light seemed to move within them like water.

But it was the weight that unsettled him most. As the pot took shape, it seemed to grow heavier than the clay itself should allow, as if it were filling with something invisible. When he cupped his hands around the form to steady it, he felt a coolness that had nothing to do with the dampness of his palms—a coolness that seemed to rise from somewhere far below the surface of the clay, from depths that should not exist in so small a vessel.

The first pot finished itself. Kallon's hands stilled on the wheel, and he found himself staring at something that should not have been possible. The form was perfect—not merely well-made, but perfect in a way that made his eyes water to look at it directly. The surface bore patterns he did not remember carving, delicate spirals that seemed to move when glimpsed from the corner of his eye, like currents in still water.

He lifted the pot from the wheel with trembling hands. It was warm—not clay-warm from working, but warm like flesh, like something that had just been alive. When he held it up to the lamplight, shadows moved within its walls, and for a moment he could have sworn he heard the distant sound of flowing water.

The second pot came easier, his hands moving without conscious thought. The clay responded to intentions he hadn't yet formed, shaping itself around his desires before he could fully articulate them. This vessel emerged taller, more elegant, its neck curved like a swan's throat. When completed, it hummed—so softly he felt it more than heard it, a vibration that traveled through his palms and up his arms.

By the fourth pot, Kallon had stopped questioning the impossibility of what was happening. His hands moved in patterns that felt ancient, guided by knowledge he had never learned. The clay sang under his touch, literally sang—a sound like wind through reeds, like water over stones. Each piece that emerged from the wheel was more beautiful than the last, and each one seemed to contain more than its physical form should hold.

He worked through the day without eating, without rest. His hands never tired, never cramped as they usually did after long hours at the wheel. The clay seemed to sustain him, feeding some hunger he hadn't known he possessed. When regular clay had exhausted him, this sacred earth energized him, made him feel more alive than he had in years.

As evening shadows crept across his workshop floor, Kallon finally stepped back to survey his work. Seven vessels sat before him, each one impossible in its perfection. They seemed to glow faintly in the fading light, their surfaces rippling with patterns that shouldn't exist, that his conscious mind insisted he had never carved.

He reached out to touch the first pot again, and his fingertips came away damp with water that had no source. The clay had been bone-dry when he lifted it from the wheel hours ago.

A rational man would have been afraid. A sensible craftsman would have questioned what he had made, would have wondered at clay that stayed warm and vessels that seemed to breathe. But Kallon felt only a deep, aching satisfaction that bordered on ecstasy. He had finally created something worthy of his vision, something that transcended the mundane limitations of ordinary pottery.

That night, he dreamed of rivers. In his sleep, his hands continued to move as if shaping clay, and he woke to find his palms stained with river silt that had not been there when he went to bed.

Chapter III: The Warning

The market square buzzed with its usual morning energy, but Kallon noticed how conversations quieted as people passed his stall. They lingered without meaning to, drawn by pottery that seemed to catch light in impossible ways, that made the air around them feel cooler, more alive. Several customers had picked up his vessels only to set them down quickly, their faces troubled by sensations they couldn't name.

He had sold nothing.

But that would change. It had to. These pieces were the finest work of his life—no, finer than anything he had imagined possible. Each pot and bowl and urn seemed to hold its own weather, its own quiet music. When the morning sun struck them, they gleamed like water frozen mid-flow.

The old woman approached just as the market reached its busiest hour. She moved slowly, leaning heavily on a walking stick worn smooth by decades of use, her eyes milky with age but somehow still sharp, still seeing. Kallon watched her progress through the crowd with the particular attention he gave to potential wealthy customers—her clothes were simple but well-made, her jewelry modest but real silver.

She stopped before his display and went perfectly still.

Her gnarled hand reached toward his largest vessel—the swan-necked piece that hummed so softly—but stopped just short of touching it. The air between her palm and the clay seemed to shimmer, and Kallon saw her fingers tremble.

"Where did you get this clay?" Her voice carried quiet curiosity, but her hand still trembled just above the vessel's surface.

Kallon smiled his craftsman's smile, the one that had sold pottery for twenty years. "From the finest riverbank in the region, grandmother. Clay of exceptional quality, as you can see. The work speaks for itself."

But the old woman wasn't looking at him. Her eyes remained fixed on the pottery, and something like wonder crossed her weathered features. "Which riverbank, potter?"

Something in her tone made his practiced pleasantries falter. "The... the bend in the river, perhaps two hours north. The water runs clear there, and the clay is..."

"Melaina's bend." The words fell from her lips like stones, and now her face showed not anger but a kind of terrible understanding. "But that's... how did you manage to...?" She trailed off, studying his face with new intensity.

The market noise around them seemed to fade. Other customers backed away without knowing why, leaving a growing circle of empty space around Kallon's stall. The old woman's stick shook in her grip.

"I don't understand," Kallon said, though something cold was beginning to crawl up his spine. "It's just clay. Good clay, yes, but..."

The old woman's laugh held no humor, only a deep weariness. "Child, that clay has been sleeping for forty years. Forty years since Melaina died in those waters, since her spirit settled into the riverbank. Every person in this region knows to leave that bend alone. But you..." She tilted her head, studying him. "You didn't know, did you?"

Kallon's mouth went dry. "Melaina?"

"River nymph, before your time, before your father's time perhaps. She loved a mortal man who could not love her back, and in her grief she dissolved into the water itself. Her essence settled into the clay at that bend, and the clay remembers everything—every sorrow, every loss, every soul that ever drowned seeking what they could not have."

The old woman stepped closer, her voice dropping to barely above a whisper. "That clay carries her hunger, potter. Her endless, consuming need. And you've been feeding it, giving it form, letting it taste the world again through your hands." She paused, watching his face carefully. "She has you already, doesn't she? You feel it when you work—the way the clay moves like something alive, stays warm when it should be cold. The dreams of water."

She was quiet for a long moment, then spoke as if to herself. "If it were me... I would take that clay back to the riverbank. Tonight. I would bury it deep and ask forgiveness from whatever gods still listen." Her eyes met his. "But perhaps you see something I do not."

Around them, the few remaining customers began to retreat further. Some crossed themselves, others whispered prayers to gods whose names Kallon had forgotten. But Kallon felt only wounded pride rising in his chest.

"Old woman, with respect, these are just stories. Local superstitions." He picked up the swan-necked vessel, felt its familiar warmth pulse against his palms. "This is the work of a master craftsman using exceptional materials. Nothing more."

The moment his skin touched the clay, the old woman drew in a sharp breath. She stepped back, her walking stick trembling in her grip, but her eyes remained fixed on his face with something that looked almost like sorrow.

"You do feel her, don't you?" she said quietly. "When you work. The way she responds to your touch." She shook her head slowly. "She's been waiting so long for hands skilled enough to give her form again."

Kallon set the vessel down, his irritation crystallizing into something harder. What did this ancient woman know of artistry, of the divine inspiration that had guided his hands? These were masterpieces, not cursed objects.

"I think you should leave," he said quietly. "You're frightening away my customers."

The old woman studied his face for a long moment, then nodded as if she had found the answer to some unspoken question. When she spoke again, her voice carried the weight of years, of choices made and unmade.

"Yes," she said simply. "I can see that you will not be turned from this path. The work is too beautiful, isn't it? Too perfect to abandon." She turned to go, then paused. "She chose well, I think. Your hands were made for this clay, potter. I only wonder if you will still think it a gift when she is finished with you."

Kallon watched her hobble away through the market crowd, his hands still tingling from contact with the vessel. Around him, his stall remained empty, his beautiful pottery gleaming untouched in the morning sun.

He should have been afraid. Every rational part of his mind screamed that the old woman spoke truth, that something was deeply wrong with clay that responded like flesh, that sang under his touch, that filled his dreams with drowning.

Instead, he felt only contempt. Stories. Superstitions. The fears of simple people who could never understand what it meant to create something truly magnificent.

That afternoon, he packed up his unsold pottery and returned to his workshop. By evening, he was back at the riverbank, gathering more clay by the light of a setting sun, his hands moving with desperate hunger through the sacred earth.

The old woman's words echoed in his memory, but they were drowned out by a sound that seemed to come from the clay itself—a whisper like water over stones, like a voice he was only beginning to hear.

Chapter IV: The Deepening

Kallon worked through the night, and the clay worked with him.

That was how it felt now—not that he was shaping the clay, but that they were collaborating, two artists with a shared vision he couldn't quite grasp. His hands moved in patterns that seemed familiar yet strange, forming vessels whose purposes he didn't understand but whose beauty made his chest ache.

The workshop had grown cold hours ago, but the clay remained warm. More than warm—it pulsed with a heat that seemed to come from somewhere deep within, like flesh over a beating heart. When he pressed his palms against the mound of sacred earth he'd gathered from the riverbank, it responded with what felt disturbingly like contentment.

He told himself it was just the exceptional quality of the material. Superior clay, nothing more. The old woman's ravings meant nothing.

But the clay had begun to move without his touch.

It started small—a subtle shift in the curve of a bowl's rim while his attention was elsewhere, the slow correction of an imperfection he'd been meaning to smooth. He caught these changes from the corner of his eye, movements that stopped the moment he looked directly. Clay settling, he reasoned. The natural behavior of such fine, responsive material.

Then the clay began to dream.

That was the only word for what he witnessed as the hours passed. Shapes would emerge unbidden from the mounds of clay—fleeting impressions of faces, of reaching hands, of bodies tumbling through water. They lasted only moments before melting back into formless earth, but each vision left him more unsettled, more hungry for the next.

When he tried to form a simple water jug, the clay resisted his design, pulling instead toward a shape that made no sense—elongated, almost serpentine, with curves that seemed to flow like liquid even as they held their form. His hands followed the clay's lead without conscious choice, and what emerged was something that had never existed in any potter's workshop: a vessel that looked as if it were perpetually flowing, frozen mid-transformation between solid and liquid.

"This is madness," he whispered to the empty workshop. But even as he spoke, his hands were reaching for more clay, hungry for whatever impossible creation would emerge next.

The clay sang back to him—not the faint humming he'd noticed before, but an actual melody, wordless but achingly familiar. Notes that seemed to rise from the earth itself, from depths where water moved in eternal darkness. He found himself humming along, though he'd never heard the song before.

His hands had begun to change.

He noticed it first as a stiffness in his fingers, a reluctance to bend that he attributed to long hours at the wheel. But when he held them up to the lamplight, he saw that his skin had taken on a grayish cast, and his fingernails were embedded with clay that wouldn't wash away no matter how hard he scrubbed.

More disturbing still, he could feel things through the clay-stained skin that he shouldn't have been able to feel. When he touched a finished pot, he sensed not just its physical properties but something deeper—the memory of water, the echo of rain that had fed the river, the sorrow of something long dissolved.

He should have been afraid. Every rational part of his mind screamed warnings that he was losing himself to something beyond his understanding. But the clay whispered reassurances in that wordless song, promised beauties yet to be revealed, masterpieces that would make him immortal.

When dawn light crept through the workshop windows, Kallon found himself surrounded by vessels unlike anything that had ever existed. Some seemed to contain entire skies—clouds moved within their walls, tiny storms raged in their depths. Others showed reflections that had nothing to do with the room around them, images of underwater gardens, of drowned cities, of faces beautiful beyond description but terrible in their longing.

He had been working for twelve hours without rest, without food, without any awareness of time's passage. His body should have been exhausted, but he felt energized, sustained by something that flowed up through his clay-stained hands and into his very bones.

Only when he tried to leave the workshop did he understand how completely the clay had claimed him.

His feet wouldn't carry him to the door. Each step away from the wheel, away from the sacred earth, felt like walking through thick water. His chest tightened, his breath came short, and a terrible emptiness opened in his stomach—not hunger for food, but a deeper starvation that only the clay could satisfy.

He turned back to the wheel, and relief flooded through him like warm water. His hands settled into the clay with a sigh that seemed to come from the earth itself, and immediately the awful emptiness receded.

"Just a little more work," he told himself, though his voice sounded strange in the dawn-lit workshop, hollow and distant. "Just one more piece, and then I'll rest."

But even as he spoke, he knew it was a lie. The clay had patience—infinite, inexorable patience. It could wait forever, singing its wordless songs, showing him visions of impossible beauty, feeding the hunger it had created until there was nothing left of Kallon but the work of his hands.

Outside, the city was waking to a new day. But in the workshop, time had ceased to matter. There was only the wheel, the clay, and the slow, sweet dissolution of everything he had once been.

The clay hummed its satisfaction, and Kallon's stained hands began to shape something new—something that looked disturbingly like a human heart, if a heart could be made of earth and sorrow and endless, consuming need.

Chapter V: The Becoming

For three days, no one saw smoke from Kallon's workshop chimney. For three days, no one heard the familiar rhythm of the potter's wheel. The silence stretched like a held breath across the quarter where artisans lived and worked, until finally concern overcame the lingering unease his last pottery had inspired.

They found the workshop door standing open.

Inside, the air moved with a strange current, as if a river flowed through the room. The wheel sat motionless, but around it, clay had spread across every surface—not scattered carelessly, but arranged with purpose, forming spirals and eddies that seemed to pulse with their own tide.

At the center of it all sat a single vessel.

It was impossible to look at directly. The eye slid away from it, unable to process what it saw—a form that seemed to contain infinite depth, walls that curved in directions that space should not allow. Water moved within it, though the vessel had no opening at the top. Real water, dark and endless, that reflected not the workshop ceiling but something else entirely: the face of a woman beautiful beyond mortal comprehension, terrible in her need.

And beside the vessel, what remained of Kallon.

He sat at his wheel as if still working, but his body had become clay itself—gray-brown earth shaped into the memory of a man. His hands merged seamlessly with the vessel's base, as if he had been absorbed into his final creation. His face, now mineral-smooth and strangely serene, bore the expression of someone who had finally understood something vast and fundamental.

But he still moved.

Slowly, like stone learning to breathe, his clay fingers continued their work, smoothing curves that needed no smoothing, perfecting perfection itself. His eyes, now hollows filled with the same dark water that moved within the vessel, tracked the movements of the living who had come to find him.

When the first villager stepped closer, drawn despite his terror by the impossible beauty of the vessel, Kallon's clay lips parted. Water spilled from his mouth instead of words—not the muddy water of rivers, but something clear and cold that tasted of depths where sunlight had never reached.

The vessel sang.

It was the song Kallon had been learning to hum, but now it rang with a voice that made the workshop walls weep moisture, that called to every buried stream and forgotten spring. Those who heard it felt an overwhelming urge to touch the vessel, to lift it, to drink from depths that promised to quench thirsts they had never known they carried.

But when they reached for it, their hands passed through the clay as if it were made of water, and the water as if it were made of longing.

The woman's face in the vessel's depths smiled then, and her joy was so terrible that the first villager fled, and then the second, and then all of them, stumbling over each other in their haste to escape something too beautiful to endure.

They sealed the workshop. Nailed boards across the door, hung iron talismans, spoke prayers to gods whose names they barely remembered. But even through wood and iron and desperate faith, they could hear it—the song that had no end, the sound of a potter who had become his final masterpiece, who sat in eternal collaboration with clay that dreamed of drowning the world in beauty.

Sometimes, on still nights when the river ran quiet, children claimed they could hear two voices singing together—one that remembered being human, and another that had never been anything but water and want and the endless hunger for form. The songs wound around each other like lovers' promises, like warnings, like the sound water makes when it finally finds a way home.

In the workshop, Kallon continued his work. His clay hands shaped nothing and everything, smoothing curves in a vessel that already contained perfection. The water within showed different faces now—not just Melaina's, but every soul who had ever drowned in longing, who had ever reached for beauty they could not possess.

And in the depths of that impossible water, new shapes began to form. Other vessels, other masterpieces waiting to be born, waiting for hands skilled enough to give them form.

The clay was patient. It had learned patience from the river, from the earth, from the slow dissolution of those who thought they could master what they did not understand.

It could wait forever.

It had found its potter. Now it would teach him to find others.

The song rose and fell like breathing, like waves, like the eternal rhythm of creation and destruction that flows beneath all making. And in that rhythm, Kallon discovered what he had always been seeking—not just beauty, but the terrible truth that beauty and hunger were the same thing, that art and devouring were one eternal act, that the only way to possess perfection was to become it completely.

His clay lips curved in something that might have been a smile, and his hollow eyes reflected depths where new songs were already beginning.

Thus ends the tale of Kallon the potter, who sought perfection and found it, who gained the world's most beautiful clay and lost his soul to its making. Let it serve as warning to all who would take what does not belong to them, who would claim mastery over forces beyond their understanding. For in the end, the clay shapes the potter as much as the potter shapes the clay, and some hungers can never be satisfied—only shared, endlessly, until the whole world learns to sing the same terrible song.

[tamesg]

I swear to God I'm never watching Power Rangers again

I've watched at least 50 hours of Mighty Morphin in the last couple weeks, and all of Zeo, and it's a terrible fucking show. Just, awful. Especially Zeo.

'Then why'd you watch it, James?'

For research purposes. Go read my fanfics already.

[tamesg]

The Weight of Gold

The Gold Ranger power sits on the Command Center's main console like a question I don't want to answer.

Alpha left me alone with it three hours ago, after running every diagnostic he could think of. "The power signature is unprecedented, Tommy," he'd said, his mechanical voice carrying genuine awe. "It's seeking someone worthy. Someone with the right... resonance."

We both knew what that meant. We both knew who that someone was.

I practice the words under my breath, the way I've been doing for the past hour. "David, I need you to consider taking on a significant responsibility." Too formal. "Hey bro, want to be a Power Ranger?" Too casual. Everything sounds wrong when I'm trying to sound like the kind of leader who makes these decisions easily.

The crystalline energy hums with impatience, casting amber light across the Command Center's familiar surfaces.

David could handle it. My brother's got the warrior instinct, the natural fighting ability. He looked ready when the power first appeared, like he was expecting this call. And more importantly, David would look to me for guidance. David would keep me as the clear leader.

David would be safe. Easy.

But easy isn't what Angel Grove needs, and I know it.

The Machine Empire's latest attack nearly broke us. Their monsters make Rita's creatures look like children's toys. We barely held the line yesterday, barely kept them from reaching the power plant. Adam took a hit that should have hospitalized him.

I pick up the phone, David's number already dialed and waiting on the small screen. One call, and I could have a Gold Ranger who won't threaten everything I've built.

One call, and I could stay exactly who I am.

My thumb hovers over the call button for thirty seconds before I clear the number.

Because a good leader doesn't choose what's easiest for himself. A good leader chooses what's best for the mission.

"David, I need you to consider—" I stop myself, and dial Jason's instead. "Jason, Angel Grove needs—" Wrong tone. Too desperate.

How would Jason handle this call? Confident, direct, no hesitation. Like the decision was obvious instead of something that's been eating me alive for hours.

"Jason." I try again, forcing my voice into the steady tone that leadership requires. "We have a situation that requires your expertise."

Better. More controlled. The way someone who belongs in charge would sound.

I press call.

Three rings. Four. Maybe he won't—

"Tommy?" His voice carries that same steady confidence it always has, like he expected this call, like he's been waiting for whatever crisis would bring us back together. "Everything okay?"

—

The Gold Ranger moves through the battlefield like he never left.

I watch from my position on the warehouse rooftop as Jason tears through a squadron of Cogs with the kind of fluid precision that used to make our enemies recalculate their entire strategy. His fighting style hasn't changed—still that perfect balance of power and control, still those decisive strikes that waste no energy, no motion.

But it's not just his technique. It's the way he moves between actions—no pause to consider if this is what a leader should do, no moment of calculating how his choices will be perceived. Just immediate, natural responses that happen to be exactly right.

Like he's not trying to be anything other than what he is.

"Tommy, southeast corner needs backup," Rocky's voice crackles through the comm, strain evident as he grapples with three Cogs at once.

I'm already moving toward Rocky's position when Jason's voice cuts through the channel: "I've got it. Tommy, hold your position and coordinate the perimeter. Keep them from flanking us."

The words are tactical. Sensible. Exactly what I would have ordered if I'd had time to assess the situation properly.

But Jason didn't need time to assess. He just saw what needed doing and said it, without that split-second hesitation I always have—that moment where I wonder if this is the right call, if this is what good leadership looks like.

"Copy that," Adam responds immediately.

"Roger," from Tanya.

"On it," from Kat.

The same crisp efficiency they've always shown when receiving orders. But there's something different in their tone. Something I haven't heard since Jason left.

Relief. Like they'd been holding their breath and finally remembered how to exhale.

Jason vaults over a pile of debris with the kind of athletic grace that made him captain of every sports team he ever joined. Three Cogs converge on his position, their mechanical movements synchronized and brutal. But Jason flows between them like he's dancing, each strike perfectly timed, each block leading seamlessly into a counter-attack.

I find myself studying his movements, looking for the calculation I know I do in every fight—the split-second pause where I measure angles and probabilities and what the tactical manual would recommend. But there's nothing. Jason just moves, trusts his instincts, lets his body respond without his mind getting in the way.

When did I stop trusting my instincts? When did every decision become a performance review? Jason's doing what I used to do—what I know I should still be doing—but somewhere along the way I convinced myself that good leadership meant overthinking everything.

One Cog goes down. Then two. The third tries to retreat, but Jason's already moving, already anticipating its escape route. A spinning kick that I remember from a hundred training sessions, and the last Cog crumbles into sparking metal.

"Nice work, Jason," Rocky says, and there's genuine gratitude in his voice. "Where'd you learn to move like that?"

"Old habits," Jason replies, and I can hear the smile in his voice even through the comm distortion.

Old habits. Not training, not study, not careful analysis of optimal combat techniques. Just... muscle memory. Natural responses that he never had to think about because they were already part of who he was.

The battle continues around me, but I find myself watching more than fighting. Cataloguing the small ways everything has shifted in the span of twenty minutes. The way Adam automatically positions himself to support Jason's advance without being asked. The way Tanya adjusts her firing pattern to complement his movements. The way the entire team flows around Jason like they're all part of the same machine again instead of five separate gears grinding against each other.

A Cog breaks through our perimeter, heading straight for the civilians we're protecting. I move to intercept, but Jason's already there, placing himself between the machine and the evacuation zone. Not because he calculated the optimal response time, but because protecting people is just what he does.

It's not a choice for him. It's not a leadership decision he has to make.

It's just who he is.

And that's when I realize what I'm witnessing isn't just Jason returning to form.

It's everyone else remembering what it felt like to follow someone who never hesitated.

—

The Machine Empire's forces retreat within the hour. Not because we've destroyed them all—we never do—but because Jason made it clear that staying would cost them more than they could afford.

In the Command Center afterward, the debriefing feels different. Sharper. More focused.

"The Cogs' attack pattern was more coordinated than usual," Adam observes, still pulling bits of metal debris from his uniform. "They were working in formation."

I step forward, automatically shifting into my leadership voice. "Which means we need to—"

"Machine Empire's learning," Jason says, examining a piece of damaged Cog circuitry that Alpha handed him. His voice carries that analytical tone I remember from our old strategy sessions—calm, methodical, completely confident in his assessment. "They're adapting to our tactics. We'll need to vary our approach."

The conversation flows toward Jason like he's a magnet, and I'm left standing at the edge with half a sentence hanging in the air. Not because anyone's trying to exclude me, but because when Jason speaks, people want to hear what comes next.

"What are you thinking?" Tanya asks, leaning in with the kind of attention I used to take for granted.

And just like that, I'm watching strategy unfold without me. Jason's hands move as he talks, sketching formations in the air while the others nod and build on his ideas. The natural flow of collaborative problem-solving that somehow never includes me unless I force my way in.

I clear my throat. Try again. "Actually, I think we should consider splitting into smaller units for the next engagement."

It's a good tactical suggestion. Sound reasoning. The kind of insight that should demonstrate my continued value as team leader.

But the moment I say it, I can see the subtle calculation happening on everyone's faces. Not dismissal, exactly, but evaluation. Like they're measuring my idea against the framework Jason just established instead of considering it on its own merits.

"That could work," Jason says, turning toward me with that same earnest expression he's always had. "Divide their forces, force them to spread their attention." He pauses, considering. "We'd need to be careful about communication protocols, though. Make sure we can coordinate if one team gets overwhelmed."

He's agreeing with me. Supporting my suggestion. Making it better.

And somehow that feels worse than if he'd just disagreed.

"Exactly," I say, forcing enthusiasm into my voice. "We could use the standard formation protocols, with modifications for—"

"Actually," Jason continues, his focus already shifting back to the tactical problem, "if we're going to split up, we should think about pairing complementary skill sets. Adam and Rocky for heavy assault, Tanya and Kat for reconnaissance..."

The planning continues around me, my suggestion absorbed into Jason's larger strategic vision like a tributary feeding into a river. Technically, I contributed. Technically, my input was valued and incorporated.

But I'm not steering the conversation anymore. I'm just providing components for someone else to assemble.

The meeting continues, logistics and tactical planning that I should be leading but somehow isn't quite mine anymore. Not because Jason's trying to take over—he keeps deferring to me, keeps asking for my approval on decisions he's clearly already made. But managing approvals isn't leadership, and we all know it.

When the others finally disperse, heading home to whatever normal lives they can manage between battles, Jason lingers.

"Walk with me?" he asks, and there's something in his voice that sounds careful. Gentle.

We end up at the overlook on the hills above Angel Grove, the spot where we used to come when we needed to think. The city spreads out below us, lights twinkling in windows where families are sitting down to dinner, where homework is the biggest crisis anyone faces.

The silence between us isn't uncomfortable, exactly. Jason's always been good at letting quiet exist without feeling the need to fill it. But tonight, the weight of everything unsaid presses against my chest like a physical thing.

"Switzerland looks different from here," he says finally, his voice soft.

I glance at him, but he's staring out at the city lights. His profile looks the same as it always has—strong jaw, steady expression, the kind of face that belongs on recruitment posters. But there's something new around his eyes. Lines that weren't there before. The kind that come from carrying responsibilities that don't involve martial arts.

"Do you miss it?" I ask.

"Parts of it." He shifts his weight, and I catch a glimpse of the gold uniform beneath his jacket. Still strange, seeing him in colors that aren't red. "The conferences were good work. Important work. Helping people find solutions that don't involve..." He gestures vaguely at the city below us, where scorch marks from today's battle are probably still visible on the streets.

"Violence," I finish.

"Yeah."

Another stretch of silence. A car drives past on the road below, its headlights sweeping across the hillside before disappearing around a curve. Normal people living normal lives, completely unaware that their city was almost destroyed by robots this afternoon.

"You know I'm here now, right?" Jason says suddenly, and his voice carries that same steady warmth it always has. "Whatever you need."

The words hit me like ice water. Not because they're cruel, but because they're kind. Because Jason means them completely, and because what I need and what's right are two completely different things.

What I need is for him to be less perfect. Less obviously the right choice for everything.

What I need is to matter the way I used to.

But what I say is: "I know."

Jason studies my face for a moment, and I can see him reading something there that I'm trying not to show. That careful assessment he's always been good at - knowing when to push and when to step back.

"I should let you think," he says quietly, and there's understanding in his voice that makes everything worse. Even my need for space, he's handling perfectly.

But as he walks away, I stay on the hill, watching his figure disappear into the darkness. Listening to the sound of his footsteps fade until it's just me and the lights of Angel Grove and the growing certainty that I've made a mistake I can't unmake.

The gold power chose him, I tell myself. It was always going to be him.

But that's not true, and I know it.

I chose him. I made the call. I brought him back because it was the right thing to do, and now I have to live with being right in a way that feels like dying.

—

"The mathematical principles are actually quite elegant," Billy says, spreading three sheets of graph paper across our table at the Beach Club. His handwriting covers every inch in precise columns and diagrams. "Leadership transition theory suggests that optimal team performance occurs when authority shifts naturally based on competency metrics."

I nod, trying to focus on what he's saying. Billy asked me to stay after the others left, said he wanted to discuss "some observations about team dynamics since Jason's return." I should have known it would involve charts.

But after last night—after watching Jason read my emotional state like a textbook and respond with perfect calibration—Billy's analytical approach feels almost insulting. Like he's trying to solve a machine malfunction instead of talking to a person who's falling apart.

"Tommy?" Billy's voice pulls my attention back. "The key insight is that leadership anxiety typically stems from identity confusion rather than actual competency deficits. Once you separate personal worth from positional authority, the adjustment becomes manageable."

Once you separate personal worth from positional authority. Like flipping a switch. Like I haven't spent two years building my entire sense of self around being the Red Ranger who leads the team.

Through the Beach Club's windows, I can see Jason jogging along the shoreline with Emily, both of them laughing about something I'm too far away to understand. No communicators going off. No tactical decisions. Just two people being present with each other in a way that looks effortless.

The way Jason was present with me last night, reading exactly what I needed without me having to say it.

"The fascinating part," Billy continues, pulling out another sheet covered in what might be probability curves, "is how this mirrors evolutionary adaptations in social hierarchies. The data clearly show that when Jason assumes tactical leadership roles, overall mission success rates improve by—" He catches himself, adjusts his glasses. "What I mean is, the transition you're experiencing is statistically normal."

He pauses, then brightens slightly. "I think it's encouraging, actually. Statistically speaking, you're in a textbook adjustment curve. It's almost optimal."

So this is what Billy thinks will help—charts and graphs explaining why Jason's better at my job than I am, and reassurance that my pain is proceeding according to schedule.

Fitness advantages. He's talking about me being evolutionarily unfit for leadership while Jason demonstrates what actual emotional intelligence looks like fifty yards away.

Billy's still talking—something about adaptation strategies and psychological frameworks—but his voice starts to feel distant, muffled. On the beach, Jason and Emily settle onto a piece of weathered log, sharing a bottle of water and pointing at something in the distance.

Whatever they're looking at, they're completely absorbed in this simple moment of existing together. No performance. No calculation. Just two people who know how to be present without analyzing whether they're being present correctly.

"Tommy?" Billy's voice carries concern now. "Are you following the correlation patterns?"

I look at him—earnest, worried, trying so hard to help me solve something he sees as a technical problem. Three sheets of calculations that reduce my pain to variables and equations while Jason demonstrates what it looks like to be naturally, effortlessly whole.

"I should go," I hear myself say.

Billy blinks, clearly not expecting this response. "But we haven't finished reviewing the adaptation strategies. I have projections for the next six months that show—"

"Thanks, Billy." I stand up, my chair scraping against the deck. "This was... helpful."

It's not helpful. None of it is helpful. Billy's trying to engineer a solution to something that can't be engineered, while Jason just... exists in the way I've been trying so hard to learn.

I'm halfway to the parking lot when I feel his hand on my shoulder. Not grabbing, not restraining—just a gentle pressure that says he tried and he knows it didn't work and he's sorry.

When he lets go and heads back toward the table, I can see him through the Beach Club windows, gathering his papers, folding his analysis into neat piles that will probably end up filed away in some drawer where good intentions go to die.

—

I sit in my car for ten minutes before starting the engine, watching Jason and Emily through the windshield. They're still on their log, still pointing at whatever they found interesting in the distance.

Jason throws another piece of driftwood for the dog. When it bounces off a rock instead of landing in the sand, Emily doubles over laughing. Jason doesn't get defensive, doesn't try again to prove his throwing accuracy. He just laughs with her, picks up another stick, deliberately throws it crooked.

More laughter.

When's the last time I laughed at my own mistakes instead of analyzing them for tactical improvements? When's the last time I did something badly on purpose just because it was fun?

Billy's charts are probably still sitting on that table, covered in equations about leadership transitions and team performance. But Billy got it wrong. This isn't about leadership at all.

It's about Jason being able to throw sticks crooked and think it's hilarious.

I watch Emily tease Jason about his terrible aim, watch him grin and deliberately miss even worse. No part of him is calculating whether this affects his authority or damages his reputation as the Gold Ranger. He's just... present. Whole. Himself.

And I realize I can't remember the last time I was just Tommy.

When the Red Zeo power chose me as leader, what did I want? Did I want to lead? Or did I want what Jason had—the respect, the certainty, the way everyone looked at him like he belonged exactly where he was?

Did I want to BE a leader, or did I want to FEEL like Jason felt?

And then it hits me like cold water: I've been trying so hard to become Jason that I destroyed whatever I had that was naturally mine. All that energy, all that performance, all those years of calculating every decision...

When what I actually wanted was to feel the way Jason feels right now. Unguarded. Present. Free to be imperfect and laugh about it. Leadership isn't something he puts on like a uniform - it's just what happens when people want to follow someone who's completely, authentically himself.

The engine turns over on the second try, but I don't put the car in gear yet. Instead, I sit here with the understanding settling over me like weight I've been carrying without realizing it.

In my rearview mirror, Jason and Emily are standing now, brushing sand off their clothes, the dog circling their feet. Normal people finishing a normal afternoon, completely unaware they've just shown me the difference between being someone and performing someone.

I know what I have to do next.

Not learn how to be a better leader. Not figure out how to compete with Jason or prove my worth to the team.

I have to learn how to be Tommy Oliver. Not the Red Ranger who leads, not the former Green Ranger trying to prove himself, not the guy calculating every decision to make sure it looks like leadership.

Just... Tommy.

The person I might have been if I hadn't convinced myself that worth came from titles and tactical decisions and other people's dependence on me.

The person I still could be, if I can figure out how to stop performing long enough to remember what authentic feels like.

The car pulls out of the parking lot smoothly, but in my rearview mirror, Jason's throwing one more stick for the dog, deliberately crooked, both of them laughing at the splash it makes when it hits the water instead of the sand.

Maybe someday I'll learn how to laugh like that too.

[tamesg]

Recognition

Ninety-two minutes.

That's how long we've been sitting in the Command Center, going over the same failed battle from every possible angle except the one that matters. Ninety-two minutes of Jason pacing back and forth, analyzing formation patterns and timing sequences. Ninety-two minutes of Billy running diagnostics on equipment that I know for a fact is working perfectly. Ninety-two minutes of Trini quietly suggesting alternative strategies while Zack nods along and Tommy stares at the floor.

Ninety-two minutes, and not one of them has asked me what I think went wrong.

"The Zords were responding normally," Billy says for the fourth time, adjusting his glasses as he studies the readouts. "All systems were operating at optimal capacity. I can't find any technical explanation for why we couldn't form the Megazord properly."

I know why. I was there.

And they still haven't noticed.

"Maybe we were just off our game today," Jason says, running his hands through his hair. "It happens. Sometimes the timing just isn't there."

Sometimes the timing just isn't there. Like it's some kind of mystical force instead of five specific people making five specific choices. Like my choice to hold back doesn't count because they never bothered to factor me into the equation anyway.

"We need to run more drills," Tommy suggests. "Practice the formation until it's automatic."

Automatic. Like we're machines instead of people. Like the problem is mechanical rather than... what? Personal? Emotional? The kind of thing you might notice if you paid attention to your teammates as human beings instead of just component parts of a giant robot?

Ninety-three minutes now. Ninety-four.

I count each one like heartbeats, like evidence. Each minute that passes without them asking for my input is another piece of proof that I've been right all along. They don't see me as an equal team member whose opinion matters. They see me as the emotional support system who shows up when they need comfort but disappears when it's time for real decisions.

Ninety-five. Ninety-six.

"Kim, you're good at reading people," Jason says suddenly, turning toward me with that same earnest expression he uses when he's trying to solve a problem. "Do you think we're all just overthinking this? Maybe we're stressed about something else and it's affecting our performance?"

One hundred and seven minutes. One hundred and seven minutes for them to remember I exist, and this is what they ask me.

Not "What did you observe during the battle sequence?" Not "Do you have any strategic insights?" Not even "Did you notice anything different about your own Zord's performance?"

They want me to be their emotional barometer. Their feelings translator. The person who reads the room so they don't have to think about messy human complications.

I look around the crystal walls of the Command Center, at the faces of my teammates all turned toward me expectantly. Waiting for me to do what I always do - make everyone feel better about a situation I know could have been prevented if they'd bothered to see me as more than their designated emotional support system.

Zordon's energy tube pulses with soft light above us, Alpha's sensors whir quietly in the background, and I realize this is my moment. The test I didn't know I was setting up.

I could tell them the truth. Admit that I deliberately sabotaged our formation, that I wanted to see if they'd notice when I wasn't functioning at full capacity. But that would mean confessing in front of Zordon, admitting I put Angel Grove at risk for something as petty as feeling ignored.

Or I could give them what they want - some insight into everyone's emotional state that explains away the tactical failure without anyone having to examine their own behavior.

"I think we're fine," I say, my voice steady and reassuring. "Just one of those days, you know? Sometimes things don't click and it's nobody's fault."

The relief on their faces is immediate. Visible. Like I've just given them permission to stop thinking about something difficult.

"That makes sense," Billy says, already closing his diagnostic equipment. "Biological systems aren't perfectly consistent. Minor variations in performance are statistically normal."

"Yeah," Zack agrees. "We'll get it next time."

Next time. Like it's inevitable that there will be problems, and equally inevitable that I'll be here to explain them away with emotional labor disguised as wisdom.

They're already moving on, already shifting into post-meeting mode, and I sit perfectly still while something crystallizes inside my chest. Cold and sharp and absolutely clear.

They don't see me. They won't see me. And if I disappear entirely, they probably won't notice that either.

But they'll notice when the Megazord formation fails again. And again. And again.

—

Tuesday: Zack's joke lands exactly the way his jokes always do - a perfectly timed punchline that catches everyone mid-sip of their drinks. Jason nearly chokes on his soda, his face reddening as he struggles between swallowing and laughing. Tommy's whole body convulses with mirth, his mouth hanging open in a way that shows too much of his half-chewed sandwich. Even Trini, who usually maintains some dignity, snorts so suddenly that a drop of milk actually comes out of her nose.

I watch their faces, cataloguing each reaction with the clinical precision of someone studying lab specimens. The way Jason's features contort, his usual leadership composure dissolving into something almost primitive. The way Tommy's laugh builds from a chuckle to something that makes his chair creak under the force of his movements, like he's having some kind of seizure. The way Trini's careful control shatters completely, leaving her dabbing at her nose with a napkin while her shoulders still shake.

How graceful. How sophisticated. These are the people I'm supposed to respect as teammates?

Zack's eyes find mine, expectant, waiting for me to join their little performance of forced hilarity. That look he gives everyone after a joke - demanding, really, that we all participate in his moment of glory. Like we owe him our laughter just because he managed to string words together in a way that amused himself.

But I don't laugh. Won't laugh. Because something about the whole display feels obscene - grown teenagers collapsing into hysterics over what? A mildly clever observation about cafeteria food? The desperation of it all, the way they throw themselves into these manufactured moments of connection like drowning people grabbing for life preservers.

"Kim?" His voice carries that note of concern that sounds so practiced, so automatic. Like he's reading from a script titled "How to Pretend You Care About People's Feelings." "You okay?"

The question hangs in the air for exactly three seconds - I count them, watching his eyes even as I do - before his gaze shifts to Tommy, who's still grinning like an idiot about the punchline. Before he can even process whatever answer I might give, Zack's already moving on to his next story, already feeding his need for constant validation from a more reliable source.

Three seconds. That's how long my emotional state matters to anyone at this table.

—

Wednesday: "The team chemistry felt really off during yesterday's battle," Jason says, stabbing his fork into his salad with the kind of deliberate precision he uses when he's trying to solve a problem. "We were just... out of sync somehow."

He's using his Leader Voice - that particular tone that signals he wants input, that he's opening the floor for strategic discussion. The same voice he uses during actual team meetings, except we're sitting in the school cafeteria surrounded by the usual chaos of teenage social dynamics.

I set down my sandwich and lean forward slightly, the way I've learned signals engagement in group conversations. "Maybe we need better communication during formation sequences. Like, actual verbal cues instead of just assuming everyone knows what—"

"Communication protocols," Billy interrupts, his eyes lighting up with that familiar spark he gets when he sees a technical problem to solve. "We could implement a standardized system of audio signals, maybe even upgrade the comm arrays in our helmets to include haptic feedback indicators that would—"

And just like that, I'm invisible again. Billy's hands start moving as he talks, sketching imaginary diagrams in the air while Jason nods with increasing enthusiasm. The conversation flows around me like I'm a rock in a stream, completely bypassing anything I might have contributed.

I watch Billy's animated gestures, the way his fingers trace complex patterns that probably make perfect sense to him but look like meaningless flourishes to everyone else. How typical that his solution involves more gadgets, more technology, more ways to avoid actually talking to each other like human beings.

Jason's nodding along like Billy's just revealed the secrets of the universe instead of suggesting they throw expensive equipment at a problem that could be solved by paying attention to the people standing next to you. His face has that expression he gets when he thinks someone's being particularly insightful - eyebrows raised, slight forward lean, that little crease between his eyes that's supposed to indicate deep thought.

It's the same expression he's never once worn while listening to anything I've said.

"That's brilliant, Billy," Jason says, and there's genuine admiration in his voice. "How long would it take to implement something like that?"

Brilliant. Because replacing human awareness with mechanical solutions is so much more sophisticated than just learning to notice when your teammates are struggling.

I take a bite of my sandwich and chew mechanically, watching Billy launch into calculations about circuit modifications and response times. The way they build on each other's ideas, the natural flow of collaborative problem-solving that somehow never seems to include me unless they need someone to manage feelings or smooth over personal conflicts.

Billy's still talking, hands moving in increasingly complex patterns, and Jason's still nodding like every word is pure wisdom. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here with sandwich crumbs on my napkin, wondering when I became the designated emotional janitor who only gets included when someone needs their feelings validated.

—

Thursday: "Hey Kim, you want to study together for the Whitman test?" Tommy asks, sliding into the seat across from me in the library. His backpack hits the table with a soft thud, and I can see his history textbook already bristling with sticky notes and highlighted passages.

For just a moment, something warm flickers in my chest. Someone actively seeking out my company, wanting to spend time with me for something other than emotional crisis management. Maybe—

"I can't," I say, glancing at the clock on the library wall. "I have gymnastics practice in twenty minutes. Coach Schmidt is working with us on our beam routines for regionals."

Tommy's face shifts through a series of micro-expressions - disappointment, calculation, resolution. The whole process takes maybe two seconds, like he's running through his options and arriving at an acceptable alternative.

"No worries," he says with a shrug that's just a little too casual, already reaching for his backpack. "I'll ask Trini. She's probably free."

The warmth in my chest crystallizes into something sharp and cold.

No worries. Like it makes absolutely no difference whether it's me or Trini sitting across from him, explaining the symbolism in "Leaves of Grass." Like we're completely interchangeable components in his academic support system - just grab whichever one happens to be available.

He's already standing, already mentally moving on to Plan B, and I watch him scan the library for Trini's familiar dark hair. There - by the poetry section, completely absorbed in whatever she's reading. Tommy's face brightens with the same expression he had when he asked me, like he's just remembered he has other options.

"See you later, Kim," he says, but he's already walking away, already focused on his next attempt at academic collaboration.

I sit there with my own textbooks spread across the table, watching him approach Trini with the exact same casual friendliness he just showed me. The same "hey, want to study together?" tone, the same expectant smile. Like asking me was just the first option on a list, not a specific desire to spend time with me as a person.

Trini looks up from her book and nods, gathering her things with efficient movements. Of course she's free. Of course she's available to help. And of course Tommy looks genuinely pleased about this development, like Plan B might actually be better than Plan A anyway.

They walk past my table on their way to find somewhere to study, and neither of them glances in my direction.

—

Friday: My pager sits silent on my desk all day, its black screen reflecting nothing but the afternoon light streaming through my bedroom window.

I check it three times during homework. Once after dinner. Twice more before bed. The display shows the same thing every time: no new messages. No blinking light. No series of numbers that would mean someone, somewhere, needs my help with something.

For the first time in months, nobody has called me with a crisis that requires immediate emotional intervention. Nobody needs me to mediate an argument, or provide a sympathetic ear, or offer the kind of careful advice that makes people feel better about their problems without actually having to solve them.

I should feel relieved. This is what I've been wanting, isn't it? A night off from being everyone's designated emotional support system. Time to focus on my own homework, my own problems, my own life that somehow always gets pushed aside when other people need something.

Instead, I feel... forgotten.

Like I only exist when other people have crises that need managing. Like my entire social value is measured by how quickly I respond to other people's emergencies, how effectively I can absorb their anxiety and transform it into something manageable.

I think about calling someone myself - just to talk, just to connect, just to prove that I can be the one who reaches out first for once. But every number I consider feels wrong. What would I even say? "Hi, I'm calling because no one called me and I feel weird about it"? "Hey, just wanted to chat because my pager hasn't beeped all day and I'm starting to think I've disappeared"?

The silence in my room grows heavier as the evening stretches on. Even the familiar sounds from downstairs - Mom washing dishes, Dad watching the news - feel distant and irrelevant. Like I'm existing in some kind of bubble where normal human connection can't reach me.

By ten o'clock, I've checked my pager fourteen times. Still nothing. Still silence. Still the growing certainty that when I'm not actively solving other people's problems, I simply don't exist in their thoughts at all.

Maybe this is what I actually am to them. Not a friend, not a person with my own needs and feelings and complications. Just a service that they access when required and forget about when they don't need it.

An emotional vending machine that sits in the corner until someone needs to feed it quarters and push the right buttons.

—

Each incident sits in my chest like a stone, small and sharp and getting heavier every day. By the end of the third week, I've catalogued seventeen separate moments of dismissal, neglect, or casual replacement. Seventeen pieces of evidence that I've been right all along about my place in this group.

The worst part is that if I described any of these moments to someone else, they'd sound like nothing. Normal teenage interactions. Friends being friends, making plans, solving problems, living their lives in the chaotic way that seventeen-year-olds do.

But they're not friends, are they? Friends notice when you're pulling back. Friends ask follow-up questions when you seem upset. Friends remember that you exist even when they don't need something from you.

I start an experiment.

Monday: I don't call Jason back when he leaves a message about being "stressed about the calculus test." Let him figure out his own test anxiety for once.

Tuesday: When Zack starts telling a story about his weekend that's clearly building toward some emotional revelation, I excuse myself to go to the bathroom. When I come back, Billy's listening with the same supportive attention I would have provided.

Wednesday: Trini mentions that she's worried about her grandmother, and instead of immediately offering to talk through her concerns, I just nod and change the subject to our chemistry homework.

Thursday: Tommy's pager goes off during lunch - some family crisis that would normally send him straight to me for advice and emotional support. Instead, I stay focused on my sandwich and let someone else deal with his drama.

Friday: I don't show up to our usual after-school hangout at the Youth Center. No explanation, no advance warning. I just... don't go.

And you know what happens?

Nothing.

Jason figures out his test anxiety by talking to Billy about study techniques. Zack gets his emotional support from Trini, who listened just as effectively as I would have. Tommy works through his family issues with some combination of the others. The world continues to turn, problems get solved, emotional needs get met.

All without me.

The group functions perfectly well when I remove myself from the equation. Better, maybe, because they don't have to worry about managing my feelings while they work through their own problems.

I've spent months thinking I was essential to their emotional ecosystem, but it turns out I was just... optional. A convenience they could easily replace with each other when I wasn't available.

That's when I start planning something bigger.

If they won't notice when I withdraw my emotional support, maybe they'll notice when I withdraw my tactical support. When the person they've been taking for granted in small ways suddenly becomes unavailable in ways that actually matter.

The opportunity comes three days later.

"Rangers," Alpha's voice crackles through our communicators during sixth period chemistry. "Rita's latest monster is attacking the downtown shopping district. You're needed immediately."

I slip out of class along with the others, but instead of the usual pre-battle focus, my mind is calculating. Running through scenarios, measuring risks, planning exactly how much I can hold back without causing permanent damage.

The monster turns out to be some kind of mirror creature that splits into multiple copies of itself every time we attack it. Standard Rita tactics - overwhelming us with numbers until we're forced to call on the Megazord to clean up the mess.

"Formation Delta-Seven," Jason calls through the comm system as putties flood the area around the creature. "Kim, take the high ground and provide cover while we—"

I move into position on the roof of a nearby building, but slower than usual. Not enough to be obvious, just slightly behind the rhythm they're expecting. My first few shots miss their targets by inches - close enough that it looks like the putties are just faster than anticipated, not close enough to actually provide the cover fire my teammates need.

Below me, I watch Jason dive for cover as three putties advance on his position. Normally, I would have cleared them out before they got within ten feet of him. Today, I let them get close enough that he has to fight his way out hand-to-hand.

"Kim, we could use some help down here!" Zack's voice carries a note of strain as he grapples with two putties at once.

I fire three shots in rapid succession, each one carefully aimed to miss by just enough. "Sorry, they're moving too fast! I can't get a clean shot!"

It's not completely a lie. They are moving fast. I'm just not trying as hard as I could to compensate for that.

The battle drags on longer than it should. My teammates take hits they shouldn't have to take, work harder than they should have to work, all because I'm giving them ninety percent effort instead of a hundred.

But they're managing. Struggling, yes, but still handling the situation. Still winning, just... messier than usual.

And that's when I realize something that makes my stomach drop.

They don't actually need me at full capacity to succeed. My deliberate mediocrity is making things harder, but not impossible. They're adapting, compensating, covering for what they assume is an off day without even questioning it.

I'm not as essential as I thought I was in any capacity.

By the time we form the Megazord, I'm seething with a frustration that has nothing to do with the monster we're fighting and everything to do with how easily my teammates have worked around my deficiency.

"Pterodactyl, online," I report, my voice steady despite the rage building in my chest.

The formation sequence begins, and I find myself at another crossroads. I could continue my subtle sabotage, throw off the connection timing just enough to cause problems. Or I could escalate.

The creature splits again, now six identical copies surrounding us as our Zords move into position. Jason's voice comes through the comm with tactical instructions, Billy provides technical analysis of the creature's splitting pattern, Zack and Trini coordinate their approach vectors.

No one asks for my input. No one requests my tactical assessment. I'm just expected to slot into place and provide whatever support they've already decided they need.

"Now!" Jason calls, and the other four Zords begin the delicate process of forming the Megazord.

I hold back.

Not a subtle delay this time, not a small timing issue that could be explained away by equipment malfunction or communication lag. I simply don't engage my Zord's connection protocols when I'm supposed to.

The formation stutters. Sparks fly across the control panels as the other Zords try to compensate for my missing link in the chain. Warning lights flash red throughout my cockpit.

"Kim, what's happening?" Jason's voice carries sharp concern now. "We're not reading your connection!"

"I'm trying!" I call back, my hands moving over controls I'm deliberately not activating. "Something's wrong with my systems!"

Below us, the six identical creatures have stopped their rampage and are turning their attention toward our incomplete formation. They seem to sense vulnerability, opportunity.

My teammates struggle to maintain their partial connection while I watch from my disconnected Zord, feeling a sick satisfaction at finally, finally being the center of their attention. Finally being the missing piece they can't ignore.

But as I watch the creatures begin their coordinated attack on the weakened Megazord formation, something cold and sharp cuts through my satisfaction.

They're actually in danger now. Real danger, not the manageable kind of struggle I've been creating. And it's my fault.

The first creature's attack hits the incomplete Megazord formation like a sledgehammer. Without my Zord's stabilizing connection, the others can't distribute the impact properly. I watch Jason's cockpit shake violently, see Zack's control panel shower sparks as systems overload.

"Kim, we need you NOW!" Billy's voice cracks with strain and something I've never heard from him before - genuine fear.

Through my viewscreen, I can see Trini's Zord listing to one side, smoke pouring from what looks like a damaged joint assembly. Jason's trying to compensate, but the partial formation is putting stress on all their systems that they weren't designed to handle.

This isn't the manageable struggle I planned. This isn't proving a point about my value to the team. This is me watching my friends get hurt because I wanted them to notice me.

Another creature strikes, and the incomplete Megazord staggers. In my peripheral vision, I catch sight of the evacuation zone where Angel Grove citizens are huddled behind emergency barriers, watching their protectors fail to protect them.

Because of me.

My hands hover over the connection controls, and for one terrible moment, I hesitate. Part of me - the hurt, angry part that's been growing for weeks - whispers that this is what they deserve. That they brought this on themselves by taking me for granted.

But then I see Jason's Zord spark again, worse this time, and something in my chest snaps back into place.

"Connection protocols, now!" I shout, my fingers flying over the controls with desperate precision.

The Pterodactyl Zord surges forward, locking into formation with a mechanical scream that sounds almost like relief. Power flows between all five Zords again, stabilizing the connections, restoring the balance that should have been there from the beginning.

The Megazord stands complete, and within minutes, Rita's creatures are nothing but glittering dust scattered across the downtown streets.

But in my cockpit, I'm shaking. Not from adrenaline or battle fatigue, but from the knowledge of what I almost did. What I actually did do, for those endless minutes when I let my friends fight for their lives with one hand tied behind their backs.

—

"Excellent work, Rangers," Zordon's voice fills the Command Center as we materialize back from the battle. "The formation difficulties you experienced were concerning, but your ability to overcome them demonstrates the strength of your teamwork."

I stand with the others in our usual post-mission formation, but everything feels different now. The crystalline walls seem too bright, the familiar hum of the Command Center's systems too loud. Every surface reflects my face back at me, and I can't escape the knowledge of what I see there.

"Kim," Jason says, turning toward me with genuine gratitude in his voice, "that last-second connection save was incredible. I don't know what we would have done if you hadn't gotten your systems back online when you did."

The praise hits me like acid. He's looking at me with the exact expression I've been craving for weeks - respect, appreciation, recognition of my essential role on the team. His voice carries real warmth, real acknowledgment of my value.

Everything I thought I wanted.

"Thanks," I manage, my voice steadier than I feel. "Just glad I could get it working again."

"Seriously," Zack adds, rolling his shoulders like he's working out kinks from the battle. "That was some clutch timing. Another few seconds and we might've been in real trouble."

Real trouble. If only he knew.

Billy's already pulling up diagnostic readings on Alpha's console, but he glances over with that smile he gets when he's impressed by good tactical work. "The power distribution during your reconnection was actually remarkable. The way you managed to stabilize all our systems simultaneously while under attack - that takes serious skill."

Each compliment lands like a physical blow. They're praising me for fixing a problem I created. Thanking me for saving them from a disaster I engineered. Looking at me with genuine admiration for demonstrating abilities I was deliberately withholding until it served my purpose.

I've gotten exactly what I wanted, and it's the worst feeling I've ever experienced.

"We should run some diagnostics on Kim's Zord," Trini says quietly, and something in her tone makes my stomach clench. "Just to make sure whatever caused the malfunction won't happen again."

There's nothing accusatory in her voice. Nothing suspicious. Just the practical suggestion of someone who wants to prevent future problems.

But when she looks at me, her eyes hold something I've never seen there before. Not anger, not suspicion, but a kind of careful neutrality that feels worse than either.

Like she's seeing me clearly for the first time, and she doesn't entirely like what she's found.

The others disperse with their usual post-mission efficiency - Jason heading home to study, Billy wanting to run actual diagnostics on the Zord systems, Zack mentioning something about dance practice. Normal teenage lives resuming after another day of saving the world.

Trini lingers.

She doesn't make a show of it, just takes her time gathering her things while the Command Center empties around us. When it's just the two of us left with Alpha puttering around his duties, she finally speaks.

"Good thing your controls started working again when they did."

Her voice is completely neutral. Conversational, even. Like she's commenting on the weather or asking about homework. But every word lands with surgical precision.

I feel my throat close up. "Yeah. Lucky timing."

Trini adjusts her backpack strap, still not looking directly at me.

The silence stretches between us, thick with everything neither of us is saying. Alpha's mechanical humming fills the space, normal sounds from a normal day in a place where nothing will ever feel normal for me again.

"Trini—"

But she's already walking away without another word, leaving me alone with the weight of what I've become and the recognition I finally earned.

The Command Center falls silent except for Alpha's distant mechanical humming. Even that stops after a moment, leaving nothing but the soft pulse of Zordon's energy tube and the sound of my own breathing. Each exhale echoes off the crystal walls, bouncing back to me like a question I don't want to answer.

In the silence, I can still hear Jason's voice: "I don't know what we would have done if you hadn't gotten your systems back online when you did."

If only he knew how easy it would have been to find out.

[tamesg]

Round Forty-Eight

The applause from the crowd sounds different when you're counting how many times you've heard it before.

Forty-seven battles. Forty-seven times Jason has raised his fist in that exact same victory pose while citizens cheer from behind the safety barriers. Forty-seven times Kim has done that little wave she does for the news cameras, the one that somehow manages to look both modest and confident. Forty-seven times Billy has immediately started running diagnostics on his equipment, because focusing on readings is easier than focusing on the fact that we just spent twenty minutes getting thrown through downtown storefronts by something that used to be a houseplant.

And forty-seven times I've been the one to crack the joke that gets everyone laughing, to find the perfect comment that reminds us we're heroes instead of just teenagers who happen to be really good at not dying.

But the timing feels off today. Not wrong, exactly, but... practiced. Like we're all musicians who've played the same song so many times we can hit every note perfectly without thinking about whether we still want to be in the band.

The crowd disperses with their usual mix of gratitude and casual acceptance. Another monster defeated, another day saved, time to get back to their normal lives while we... what? Go home and pretend we have normal lives too?

The Command Center's crystal walls catch the light from Zordon's energy tube, casting familiar patterns across the floor. We've demorphed, but somehow the routine continues exactly the same way.

"Good work out there, everyone," Jason says, using that same tone he uses for the cameras, for the crowds, for anyone who needs to believe we've got this handled. But it's just us here. Alpha's running diagnostics. Zordon's reviewing the battle data.

Forty-seven battles. Forty-seven times we've stood in this exact formation, Jason in the center, the rest of us arranged around him like we're posing for a poster. Forty-seven times Kim has tucked that strand of hair behind her ear and given us her "we did it again" smile. Forty-seven times Billy has immediately started checking his communicator readings even though Alpha already told us all systems are normal, because focusing on data is easier than focusing on the fact that we just spent twenty minutes getting thrown through downtown storefronts by whatever fresh nightmare Lord Zedd sends our way.

And forty-seven times I've been the one to find the perfect comment to keep everyone's spirits up, to remind us that we're the good guys in a story that definitely has a happy ending.

"Well," I say, and the words feel automatic, "at least this time the monster didn't try to turn us into smoothie ingredients."

Trini makes that soft snorting sound she does when she's trying not to laugh. Kim shakes her head with that fond exasperation she's perfected over forty-seven battles. Billy glances up from his communicator just long enough to give me a small smile before returning to readings that definitely haven't changed in the last thirty seconds.

Everything hits its mark. Every response lands exactly where it's supposed to, like we're all reading from a script we've memorized so well we don't even need to think about our lines anymore.

But today, for the first time, I notice the pause.

It's tiny - maybe half a second - between Kim's hair tuck and her smile. Like she has to remember which expression comes next. And Billy's fingers hover over his communicator for just a beat too long before he starts his diagnostic routine, as if he's forgotten why he reaches for it every time.

Even Jason's posture shift happens a fraction of a second late, like his body knows the choreography but his mind is somewhere else entirely.

We're all here, all performing our parts perfectly, but something about the timing feels... empty. Like an echo of something that used to be natural but has become mechanical through repetition.

"Rangers," Zordon's voice fills the Command Center, and we all turn toward the energy tube with the same synchronized movement we've done forty-seven times before. "You have once again proven yourselves worthy of the Power. Lord Zedd's latest scheme has been thwarted."

"Thanks, Zordon," Jason replies, and there's that tone again. The one that says everything's under control, we're handling it, no problems here.

But is that true? Are we handling it?

I watch Trini nod at Zordon's praise, the same precise angle she always uses - respectful but not subservient, confident but not cocky. It's perfect. It's exactly right. It's also completely automatic, like her neck has muscle memory for the exact degree of acknowledgment that says "reliable teammate" without saying "show-off."

When did we all become so good at this?

"Lord Zedd's power appears to be growing stronger," Zordon continues, and I feel the familiar tightening in everyone's posture. Shoulders straightening. Jaws setting. The subtle shift from "we did it" to "we'll do it again" that happens every time he mentions whatever fresh nightmare is heading our way.

"We can handle it," Jason says automatically, and Kim nods, and Billy adjusts his glasses, and Trini crosses her arms in that way that means she's already thinking three moves ahead.

And I open my mouth to add something reassuring, something that'll keep the energy positive, something about how we've beaten everything else so far, right?

But the words stick.

Because forty-seven battles ago, when Zordon first told us about Rita, it felt like a story with an ending. Defeat the witch, save the world, go back to normal life. Simple. Heroic. Temporary.

Now he's talking about Lord Zedd like he's just the next item on an endless list. Like there'll be another name after him, and another after that, stretching out into a future where we're still standing in this exact formation, saying these exact words, until we're thirty or forty or dead.

"Zack?" Kim's voice cuts through the silence, and I realize everyone's looking at me. Waiting for my line. The joke that makes everything feel manageable again.

"Yeah," I manage. "Course we can handle it. We're the Power Rangers, right?"

But even as I say it, the words taste like stale air.

Alpha rolls forward, his movements creating that familiar mechanical whirring sound that used to be comforting. Now it just sounds like another part of the routine.

"Ay yi yi, Rangers! The city's power grid took some damage during the fight. I'm detecting fluctuations in the electrical systems near the downtown area."

"We should probably check that out," Jason says, already shifting into leader mode. "Make sure there aren't any civilians affected."

Another task. Another responsibility. Another thing we need to handle because we're the only ones who can.

I watch Billy perk up slightly at the mention of electrical systems - this is his element, something concrete he can fix with actual tools instead of just repeatedly punching clay monsters. But even his enthusiasm looks practiced now, like he's performing his own expertise.

"I can run a diagnostic on the affected areas," he offers, already reaching for equipment that Alpha's probably going to hand him anyway.

"Good thinking," Kim says, and Trini nods, and I hear myself adding, "Yeah, can't have people's toasters going haywire because we had to throw a plant monster through a power station."

They smile. They always smile. But I'm starting to notice how the smiles don't quite reach the timing they used to. Like we're all running on a delay, processing what we're supposed to feel before we feel it.

How long have we been performing for each other? How long has it been since any of us said what we actually wanted to say instead of what we were supposed to say?

"Rangers," Zordon's voice carries that tone that means he's about to dismiss us, send us back to our normal lives like we can just flip a switch and become regular teenagers again. "Continue to stay vigilant. Lord Zedd's next attack could come at any time."

Any time. Always. Forever.

The weight of that settles over the Command Center like dust.

—

The Youth Center's glass doors reflect my face for a split second as I push through them, and I barely recognize the expression looking back. When did I start checking my smile before I walked into a room?

Inside, the familiar chaos of late afternoon Angel Grove teenagehood unfolds exactly like it always does. The Youth Center's familiar disinfectant burns sharp in my nostrils, cutting through the deeper smell of old gymnasium mats and teenage anxiety. Electrical cables give off that faint ozone scent that means voltage running through copper wire. The air itself feels dense, charged with the particular tension that builds before people perform for strangers. Ernie's wiping down tables that probably got dusty from this morning's monster attack. Someone's boom box plays the kind of aggressively upbeat music that's supposed to drown out any lingering thoughts about giant plant creatures destroying the business district. A few kids are clustered around the arcade games, feeding quarters into machines that miraculously survived another week of citywide destruction.

And there, at our usual table near the windows, are my teammates. Already deep in conversation with a group of Angel Grove High students I recognize but don't really know. Everyone's leaning in with that particular intensity that means they're talking about today's attack.

"I mean, thank God for the Power Rangers," some girl - Sarah, maybe? - is saying as I approach. Her voice carries that breathless quality people get when they're discussing something that was genuinely terrifying but turned out okay. "I was in the mall when that thing came through the skylight. If they hadn't shown up..."

"They always show up," Jason replies, and his voice has that same steady reassurance he uses in the Command Center, just pitched differently. Civilian Jason instead of Leader Jason, but still performing confidence for people who need to believe someone's in control. "The Power Rangers have never let Angel Grove down."

Kim nods earnestly. "I can't imagine how exhausting it must be for them, though. Fighting monsters like that every single day."

I stop walking.

She can't imagine how exhausting it is. Kim - who I watched get thrown through three storefront windows not two hours ago - is sitting there with perfect sincerity, discussing how tired the Power Rangers must be.

"I heard from my cousin who works downtown that the Power Rangers were fighting for like three straight hours yesterday," another voice chimes in - some kid whose name I still don't know, dark hair, probably a junior, definitely someone who's been in this Youth Center every day for the past year talking about monster attacks like they're weather reports. "Three hours of getting beat up by some kind of robot chicken thing. How do they even do that?"

Billy adjusts his glasses, and I can see him calculating his response, the same way he calculates everything else. "Well, theoretically, sustained combat of that duration would require incredible physical conditioning and mental fortitude. The psychological toll alone..."

He trails off, and I realize he's not just giving his usual technical analysis. He's describing his own experience, clinically dissecting his own exhaustion, and disguising it as academic speculation.

"Plus they never get credit for the cleanup," Trini adds quietly. "I mean, they save the city, but then someone has to deal with all the broken glass and the power outages and the..."

Her voice catches slightly on the last word, and I know she's thinking about the family that got evacuated from their apartment building this morning. The one we couldn't get to fast enough. The one that'll be in a hotel for the next two weeks while their home gets rebuilt.

Again.

"The Rangers handle that stuff too, though, right?" Sarah asks. "Like, they must have some kind of cleanup crew or something?"

"No," the word comes out of my mouth before I can stop it. Everyone turns to look at me, and I feel my face automatically arrange itself into my usual easy smile. "I mean, no, I don't think they do cleanup. That's what insurance is for, right?"

Except insurance doesn't cover monster attacks. I know because I've heard Ernie on the phone with his insurance company every single week, explaining that no, it wasn't vandalism, it was a giant mechanical bee, and yes, that's different somehow.

"Zack!" Kim's voice has that particular brightness that means she's relieved to see me, to have someone else to help carry the weight of this conversation. "We were just talking about today's attack. Did you see any of it?"

The invitation hangs in the air, and I feel my mouth opening to give the standard response. Something about being at the library, or helping my mom with errands, or whatever alibi explains why Zack Taylor was conveniently nowhere near downtown when the Power Rangers were getting pulverized by a mutant fern.

"Yeah," I hear myself say instead. "I saw some of it."

The table goes quiet for a beat. Not suspicious quiet - more like the respectful silence people give when someone's about to share their brush with danger. But I catch the way Jason's shoulders tense slightly, the way Trini's fingers pause over her smoothie straw.

"It was..." I search for words that aren't lies but aren't truth either. "It looked pretty rough. For the Rangers, I mean. That thing was really throwing them around."

"Were you scared?" Sarah leans forward, and there's something hungry in her expression. Not malicious, just... eager for the story. For the drama of living through something that'll sound exciting when she tells it later.

Was I scared? When that vine wrapped around my ankle and slammed me into the pavement hard enough to crack the concrete? When I felt my ribs compress and wondered if they were going to snap? When I realized this was happening again, and it was going to keep happening, and somewhere in Angel Grove there was probably already another houseplant getting ready to mutate?

"Yeah," I say quietly. "I was scared."

The honesty tastes foreign in my mouth, like speaking a language I've forgotten how to use.

Kim's hand moves slightly across the table, like she wants to reach for mine but catches herself. Because Kimberly Hart, concerned civilian, wouldn't necessarily comfort Zack Taylor, fellow witness, the way Pink Ranger would comfort Black Ranger.

Even our sympathy has to be performed at the right distance.

"The weird thing is," says the kid whose name I still don't know, "you kind of get used to it, you know? Like, my mom still freaks out every time the sirens go off, but I'm just like, 'Oh, Tuesday.'"

A few people laugh, that nervous kind of laughter that means he's said something everyone's thinking but nobody wants to admit.

"That's messed up, though," Sarah says, but she's smiling when she says it. "We shouldn't have to get used to giant monsters. That's not normal."

Billy opens his mouth like he's going to say something about adaptation responses and psychological conditioning, then closes it again. Probably realized that Billy Cranston, high school student, wouldn't know quite that much about trauma psychology.

"At least the Power Rangers seem to have it figured out," the nameless kid continues. "They always look so... I don't know, ready for it? Like they're never surprised anymore."

Never surprised. Right. Because when you know you're going to be fighting for your life every day, surprise becomes a luxury you can't afford.

"I wonder what they do when they're not fighting monsters," Trini says, and her voice is so carefully neutral that it makes my chest ache. "Like, do they just... wait around for the next attack? Do they have jobs? Families?"

"They probably can't," Kim says quietly. "I mean, how do you plan anything when you know it's going to get interrupted? How do you make friends who don't know your secret? How do you..." She stops herself, but I know how that sentence ends. How do you have a life that isn't just waiting for the next disaster?

The silence that follows is different from before. Heavier. Like we've all accidentally said something true, and now nobody knows how to take it back.

"Well," Jason says finally, and I can hear him reaching for his usual wrap-up tone, the one that signals it's time to move on to lighter topics. "I'm sure they're fine. The Power Rangers, I mean. They seem pretty... resilient."

But the word comes out flat, like even he doesn't believe it anymore.

Sarah checks her phone and makes a face. "Ugh, I should get home. Mom's making me help with dinner since the restaurant downtown is still closed from last week's attack." She stands, gathering her bag. "See you guys tomorrow. Assuming there's still a school to go to."

More nervous laughter as the group starts to disperse. Quick goodbyes, promises to text later, the usual social maintenance that keeps everyone feeling connected even when they're all pretending everything's normal.

Within five minutes, it's just the five of us at the table. The background noise of the Youth Center continues around us - someone losing badly at Street Fighter, Ernie's radio playing soft rock from the kitchen, the distant hum of traffic from Angel Grove citizens going about their lives like this morning didn't happen.

Nobody speaks for a long moment. We all stare at our drinks, or the table, or the windows that look out onto a street that still has glass scattered on the sidewalks.

Finally, Kim breaks the silence.

"So," she says, and her voice sounds different without an audience. Smaller. More tired. "Anyone else feel like we're really—"

The look happens so fast I almost miss it.

Trini's eyes snap to Kim's face, and there's something sharp in her expression. Not angry, exactly, but... warning. Like a hand reaching out to catch something before it falls and breaks.

Kim's mouth stays open for half a second, the rest of her sentence hanging in the air like a held breath. Then her jaw clicks shut and she looks down at her smoothie, stirring it with sudden, intense concentration.

"—tired?" she finishes weakly. "From all the... homework. And stuff."

Jason nods absently. Billy makes a noncommittal sound, already reaching for his communicator to check some reading that definitely hasn't changed since the last time he looked at it thirty seconds ago.

But I saw it. The moment Kim almost said something true, and the moment Trini stopped her. Not with words, not with anything the others would even notice, just with that one look that said: Don't. We can't. Not here. Not now. Not ever.

And Kim understood immediately. Backed down. Retreated into safer territory.

So Trini knows. Trini knows exactly what Kim was about to say, which means Trini's been thinking it too. Which means I'm not the only one who's noticed that we're all slowly drowning in this performance.

But Trini also made the choice to keep us drowning rather than let us surface for air.

The silence stretches between us, thick with everything Kim didn't say and everything the rest of us aren't saying either. I count the seconds - one, two, three, four - waiting for someone to break it with a joke or a question or anything that'll let us go back to pretending.

Five, six, seven...

Eight, nine, ten...

The silence is becoming its own kind of performance now. We're all sitting here, carefully not saying the thing we're all thinking, and even that feels like another script we're following. The "pretend everything's fine" script, the "don't rock the boat" script, the "keep everyone comfortable" script.

And I realize I'm about to do what I always do. Make a joke. Deflect. Find some way to break the tension that doesn't actually address what's causing it. Keep everyone's spirits up while we all slowly suffocate on the things we can't say.

My mouth opens, ready to deliver some perfectly timed comment about homework or smoothies or anything that'll get us back to safer ground.

But for just a second, I can see exactly what would happen if I said something true instead. If I said "Kim's right, we are really good at lying now" or "When's the last time any of us said how we actually felt?"

I can see Jason's face going tight with that look he gets when someone threatens team unity. I can see Billy retreating into technical explanations because emotional chaos is the one problem his analytical mind can't solve. I can see Trini giving me the same warning look she just gave Kim, the one that says Don't make this worse by making it real.

And I can see Kim looking at me with desperate gratitude for finally saying what she couldn't, right before she realizes that saying it out loud doesn't actually change anything. We'd still have to get up tomorrow and fight another monster. We'd still have to smile for the cameras and reassure the civilians and pretend this is all sustainable.

The only difference would be that we'd all know that we know we're dying by inches, and we'd have to keep doing it anyway.

"Well," I hear myself say instead, and my voice sounds like it's coming from somewhere outside my body, "at least the homework doesn't fight back."

It's not even a good joke. It's barely a joke at all. But it does what it's supposed to do - gives everyone something to smile at, a reason to look at each other instead of staring at their drinks, a way back to the comfortable rhythm of not talking about anything that matters.

Kim laughs, and the sound is only slightly hollow. "Speak for yourself. My calculus homework definitely has it out for me."

"Chemistry's worse," Billy says, already reaching for his backpack. "Speaking of which, I should probably get started on the lab report that's due tomorrow."

He's lying. Billy finished that lab report three days ago, the same way he finishes everything three days early. But it gives him an excuse to leave, to escape this table where we almost said something true.

"Yeah, I should head home too," Trini says, already standing. She doesn't meet anyone's eyes. "See you guys tomorrow."

They scatter like we're fleeing the scene of a crime, which maybe we are. The crime of almost being honest with each other. Almost admitting that we're all drowning.

Within five minutes, it's just me and Jason at the table. He's staring out the window at the Angel Grove street, watching normal people walk past carrying normal problems - grocery bags and coffee cups and textbooks that aren't hiding communicators.

"Hey, Zack! Jason!" Bulk's voice booms across the Youth Center, and we both look up to see him approaching our table. He's carrying a large potted plant - some kind of fern with broad, green leaves that catch the afternoon light streaming through the windows.

The reaction is instant and involuntary. My muscles coil, hands already moving toward where my morpher would be. Beside me, Jason's entire body goes rigid, his eyes locked on the plant with the kind of focused intensity he usually reserves for actual threats.

"Ernie asked me to move this thing," Bulk continues, oblivious to our sudden tension. "Says it needs more sunlight or something. But man, this thing is heavier than it looks. You'd think it was gonna come alive and start attacking people or something!"

He laughs at his own joke, hefting the innocent houseplant higher in his arms. The leaves rustle with the movement, and I feel my heart rate spike before my brain catches up and reminds me that normal plants don't try to kill people.

Usually.

"Where, uh..." Jason clears his throat, and I can hear him working to keep his voice steady. "Where does Ernie want it?"

"Over by the front windows. Better light, he says." Bulk adjusts his grip on the pot. "Though between you and me, I think he just wants to torture me. This thing weighs like a hundred pounds."

As Bulk walks away, struggling slightly with his leafy burden, Jason and I sit in complete silence. Neither of us moves. Neither of us says anything. We just watch Bulk position the plant by the windows, both of us probably calculating exit strategies and attack patterns for a threat that doesn't exist.

When Bulk finally walks away, whistling some tune I don't recognize, the silence between Jason and me feels different. Heavier. More honest.

"We both just..." Jason starts, then stops.

"Yeah," I say quietly. "We did."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"Want to get some air?" Jason asks, and there's something in his voice I haven't heard before. Not leader Jason asking for a tactical discussion. Just... Jason.

"Yeah," I say again. "Let's go."

—

The beach is only a ten-minute walk from the Youth Center, but it feels like stepping into a different world. The late afternoon sun turns the Pacific into a sheet of hammered gold, and the sound of waves hitting the shore creates a rhythm that has nothing to do with monster attacks or communicator alerts.

We walk in silence for a while, our feet sinking slightly into the sand with each step. There are a few other people scattered along the beach - a jogger in the distance, a family packing up from what looks like a day-long picnic, an elderly couple walking hand in hand near the water's edge. Normal people doing normal things, completely unaware that the two teenagers walking past them spent the morning getting beaten senseless by a mutant plant.

Jason stops when we reach a piece of driftwood that's been worn smooth by years of waves. He sits down heavily, like the weight he's been carrying all day has finally become too much to bear standing up.

I settle beside him, and for a moment we just stare out at the endless expanse of water. The ocean doesn't care about Power Rangers or Lord Zedd or the fact that Angel Grove gets attacked every few days. It just keeps doing what it's always done - rolling in and out with a patience that makes human problems seem very small and very temporary.

"You okay?" he asks finally, and his voice has that careful tone he uses when he's checking on team morale.

Even now. Even after what just almost happened, he's still performing his role as leader, making sure everyone's holding together.

I should say yes. I should give him the same reassuring smile I give everyone else, tell him I'm fine, maybe make another weak joke about homework or monster attacks or anything that'll let us both pretend this conversation isn't happening.

Instead, I just look at him.

Really look at him, maybe for the first time in weeks. And I see the exhaustion he hides behind his leader voice, the way his shoulders carry weight that has nothing to do with the workout he just finished. The slight tremor in his hands that he covers by keeping them flat on his thighs.

Jason Scott, the guy who's supposed to have all the answers, who makes the calls that keep us alive, who carries the responsibility for every mistake and every close call and every time we almost don't make it home.

"Are you?" I ask quietly.

The question hangs between us. Not the casual "how's it going" check-in that teammates do, but the real question. The one that cuts through all the performance and asks about the person underneath the red uniform.

Jason's quiet for a long moment, his eyes still fixed on the ocean. When he finally speaks, his voice is different. Softer. Like he's dropped the leader mask for just a few seconds.

"Some days I wake up and I can't remember what I used to worry about," he says. "Before all this. What kept me up at night when the biggest problem in my life was a math test or whether Ashley Morrison was going to say yes to homecoming."

He pauses, and I realize this might be the first time I've heard Jason talk about his life before the Power Rangers like it was actually real.

"And then I think about how we've got maybe six hours before the next attack, and how I need to make sure everyone's ready, and how if I make the wrong call..." He stops himself, but I know how that sentence ends. If he makes the wrong call, one of us doesn't come home.

I want to tell him it's not all on him. Want to say that we're a team, that the weight isn't his alone to carry. But sitting here, watching him stare out at Angel Grove like he's memorizing every building he might have to watch get destroyed tomorrow, I realize something.

Jason's not just performing leadership for us. He's performing it for himself. The steady voice, the confident decisions, the unshakeable belief that we can handle whatever comes next - it's how he keeps from falling apart under the weight of knowing that five people's lives depend on his judgment every single day.

And if he admits that it's too much, if he lets himself crack even for a second, then what happens to the rest of us? Who makes the calls? Who tells us it's going to be okay when we're getting torn apart by whatever nightmare Lord Zedd sends next?

"I keep thinking," he continues, his voice barely above a whisper, "that Zordon made a mistake. That there were better choices. Smarter choices. People who wouldn't..." He trails off again, but I can fill in the blanks. People who wouldn't freeze up. People who wouldn't second-guess every decision until someone gets hurt.

"But then Monday comes around, and the alarm goes off, and everyone's looking at me to know what to do." He finally turns away from the window, meets my eyes. "So I do. I figure it out. I make the call. And somehow we all make it home."

He's telling me he sees it too. The weight. The exhaustion. The way we're all slowly breaking under the pressure of being the only thing standing between Angel Grove and total destruction.

But he's also telling me why we can't say it. Why we can't break.

"Because if Kim had said it," he continues, "if she'd actually put it into words, then we all would have had to decide what to do about it. And there's nothing we can do about it."

His hands flex, and I notice the small scars across his knuckles, each one marking a beat in our endless percussion of violence.

"You know what the worst part is?" Jason's voice gets even quieter. "Sometimes I catch myself hoping for it."

"For what?"

"For one of us to get hurt bad enough that we have to stop."

The words hit me like cold water. Jason Scott - steady, reliable, never-breaks-under-pressure Jason - admitting he fantasizes about escape through injury. About being forced to quit because that's the only way any of us would be allowed to.

As he keeps talking, the pieces click together in my mind. The way he checks his watch obsessively between battles, not because he's impatient but because he's calculating how much normal life he can squeeze in before the next alarm goes off. The way his jaw tightens whenever Zordon mentions Lord Zedd's growing power, not from determination but from the weight of knowing things are only going to get worse. The way he never talks about college applications anymore, never mentions anything beyond next week, because planning a future feels like a luxury we can't afford.

Jason's still explaining something about responsibility and Angel Grove and what happens if we quit, but I'm barely listening to the words anymore. I'm watching his face, seeing the exhaustion he hides so well that even I - who notices everything about rhythm and timing and the spaces between what people say - didn't catch it until now.

He finally stops talking, and we sit in the quiet for a moment. Not the performative silence from before, when we were all drowning separately. This is different. Heavier, but somehow easier to breathe in.

I look at Jason - really look at him - and see someone who's been carrying the same weight I have, just from a different angle. The weight of pretending this is sustainable. The weight of being responsible for keeping everyone together when you're falling apart yourself. The weight of being the only people who know how close we come to losing every single time.

But now we both know. Now the weight is split between two people instead of crushing one.

"Thanks," I say quietly, and Jason nods like he understands exactly what I'm thanking him for. Not for the explanation, not for the honesty, but for letting me know I'm not the only one who sees it. I'm not the only one who's been silently suffocating under the performance of being fine.

We're still trapped. We still have to get up tomorrow and fight whatever fresh nightmare Lord Zedd sends our way. We still have to smile and wave and reassure everyone that we've got this handled.

But at least now I know I'm not trapped alone.

The moment stretches between us, comfortable in a way nothing has been for weeks. Just two people who finally understand each other, sitting in the wreckage of everything they can't say to anyone else.

Then our communicators erupt in synchronized beeping.

Jason's shoulders tense automatically, his face shifting into the expression he wears when it's time to save the world again. I watch him become Red Ranger Jason before he's even answered the call.

"We're here, Alpha," he says, and his voice is steady. Confident. Everything Angel Grove needs to hear.

I lean back and catch his eye.

"Ready for round forty-eight?" I ask, and for the first time in weeks, my smile feels real.

[tamesg]

Still Water

Grandmother's katas begin at five-thirty each morning.

I can hear the whisper of bare feet on hardwood from my bedroom, the careful shift of weight from center to forward stance. Brush Knee and Push. Wave Hands Like Clouds. Each movement precise as clockwork, measured in breaths that have counted the same rhythm for forty years.

This morning, something catches.

The pause between forms lasts three seconds too long. Her weight settles back instead of forward. Through the thin wall between my room and hers, I can feel the hesitation - not in the movement itself, but in the space around it, the way silence holds its breath before thunder.

I press my palm against the cool plaster, feeling for the vibrations of her footsteps. Left foot, right foot, turn. The pattern should be as familiar as my own heartbeat, but there's a tremor now. A skip in the rhythm that makes my chest tighten.

The space between movements grows longer.

"Trini?" Her voice carries through the wall, soft and slightly breathless. "Are you awake, little one?"

I slip from my bed, bare feet finding the cold spots on the floor where morning light hasn't reached. In the living room, Grandmother stands in Mountain Pose, arms at her sides, but her left hand trembles against her thigh. Just slightly. Just enough.

"Did I wake you?" she asks, though we both know I've been listening to her morning practice since I was old enough to understand the difference between stillness and motion.

"Your balance," I say carefully. "In Wave Hands - you shifted back instead of settling forward."

She smiles, but there's something fragile in it. "Old bones, little one. Even mountains eventually learn to bend."

But mountains don't learn to bend. They erode. They crack under pressure. They fall.

I watch her attempt the next form - Single Whip - and her wrist doesn't quite complete the rotation. The movement that should flow like water moving around stone stutters, incomplete. Her breathing stays even, controlled, but I can see the frustration flickering behind her dark eyes.

"Perhaps we could practice together this morning," I offer.

"Perhaps," she says, but when she moves into the opening stance, her right knee buckles slightly. She catches herself, straightens, pretends it didn't happen.

We both pretend it didn't happen.

But I felt it through the floorboards. The slight shift in her weight distribution, the way her center of gravity wavered for just a moment before finding its place again. In tai chi, balance is everything. Without balance, there is no form. Without form, there is no peace.

Without peace, there is only the space between what was and what might be.

And that space is growing larger every day.

—

Three weeks pass like this. Small deteriorations disguised as age, explained away with gentle lies we both choose to believe.

The tremor in her left hand becomes more pronounced during Cloud Hands. Her balance wavers in Golden Rooster Stands on One Leg - a form she used to hold for minutes without effort. Now she lasts thirty seconds before her planted foot shifts, searching for stability that seems to slip away like water through cupped palms.

"The weather," she says when her wrist won't complete the spiral in Snake Creeps Down. "Changes in atmospheric pressure. Makes the joints stiff."

I nod. Make tea with extra ginger. Research arthritis treatments on my computer while she naps in her chair by the window, sunlight falling across her hands in patterns that make the slight stiffness in her fingers look almost artistic.

At school, Billy mentions new advances in treating neurological disorders. I listen with careful attention, filing away information about tremors and balance issues and progressive muscle weakness. Just academic interest. Nothing personal. Nothing that makes my throat close when he describes how certain conditions can appear slowly, then accelerate without warning.

"Fascinating," I say, and my voice stays level. Controlled. The way Grandmother taught me - emotion is like water, it finds its own level if you don't try to dam it up.

But some dams are meant to hold.

During our third monster attack this month - something with too many arms and an unfortunate fondness for destroying public fountains - I execute a perfect spinning kick that sends three putties flying in formation. Jason calls out approval. Kim cheers. Everything flows exactly as it should, muscle memory and training combining in moments of pure, controlled motion.

I land in a crouch, breathing steady, centered.

Perfect balance.

Unlike Grandmother, who this morning couldn't maintain Tree Pose for more than ten seconds.

The thought comes unbidden, unwelcome. I push it down, focus on the next wave of putties. But it stays there, a weight in my chest that feels like stones settling at the bottom of a clear pond.

Some things disturb the stillness no matter how carefully you try to smooth the surface.

—

By the fourth week, Grandmother stops attempting the more complex forms entirely.

"My knees aren't what they used to be," she says, settling into a chair to watch me practice instead. But I see how her fingers curl against the armrests, knuckles pale with the effort of gripping something that should require no effort at all.

I move through the sequence alone - Carry Tiger to Mountain, Part Wild Horse's Mane, Fair Lady Works at Shuttles. Each form precise, controlled, everything she taught me about finding center and moving from that place of perfect stillness. But the room feels unbalanced without her movements mirroring mine.

"Your form is beautiful, little one," she says when I finish. "Like watching water remember how to be a river."

I bring her tea afterward, settling the cup carefully in her stiffening hands. She takes a sip, then pauses, staring into the amber liquid with an expression I can't read.

"I've been having the strangest dreams," she says quietly. "A woman with white hair. She stands at the foot of my bed and... laughs. Such a cold sound."

The cup trembles slightly in her grip. Tea ripples in perfect concentric circles.

"Just dreams, Grandmother."

"Yes," she agrees, but her voice carries doubt. "Just dreams. Though she seems so... real. She tells me things. About growing old. About how the body betrays us, piece by piece."

She lifts the cup again, and for just a moment, the surface of the tea acts like a mirror. I catch a glimpse of something that makes my blood freeze - not Grandmother's reflection looking back, but someone else entirely. White hair. Purple lips curved in a smile that promises cruelty.

The cup slips from Grandmother's fingers.

It hits the floor with a sound like breaking stones.

—

I clean up the broken porcelain while Grandmother sits very still, staring at her empty hands. The pieces are sharp, precise - clean breaks that slice through the soft pads of my fingers as I gather them. Three drops of blood fall onto the hardwood before I notice.

"I'm sorry, little one," she whispers. "My hands... they don't seem to belong to me anymore."

But it's not her hands I'm thinking about. It's the face in the tea, the cruel smile that lasted exactly three seconds before the cup shattered. Rita Repulsa's reflection where Grandmother's should have been.

At school the next day, I find myself watching every reflective surface. Windows. The polished surface of the water fountain. Searching for white hair and purple lips, for any sign that what I saw was real and not some trick of afternoon light and worry.

"You okay?" Kim asks during lunch, following my gaze to the blank computer monitor behind her. "You keep looking at... nothing."

"Fine," I say, but the word tastes like broken glass.

That evening, Grandmother attempts her katas again. I watch from the doorway as she moves through the opening sequence, her movements careful and deliberate. But something is wrong with her balance - not just the physical tremor I've been tracking, but something deeper. Her center of gravity shifts unpredictably, like someone learning to move in a body that doesn't quite fit.

Halfway through Brush Knee and Push, she stops entirely.

"I can't," she says, and there's something like panic in her voice. "I can't remember what comes next. Forty years of practice, and suddenly..."

She looks down at her hands as if they might hold the answer. In the lamplight, her fingers appear slightly translucent. Not pale - translucent. Like she's becoming less solid, less there.

"The woman in my dreams," she says without looking up. "Last night she told me something. She said the body is just earth and water, and earth always returns to stone."

My throat closes. "Grandmother-"

"She knew things about you, little one. About your friends. She spoke of yellow light and ancient power." Her eyes meet mine, and they're clear despite everything else that's failing. "Who is she, Trini? And why does she visit my dreams?"

I want to tell her. Want to explain about Rita, about the Power Rangers, about monsters and magic and the thousand ways evil tries to break into our world. But the words stick in my throat like stones.

Because if Rita is visiting Grandmother's dreams, if she's appearing in reflections...

This isn't random aging. This isn't natural deterioration.

This is a targeted attack.

And somehow, I know that telling the truth will only make it worse.

—

The next morning, Grandmother doesn't attempt katas at all.

I find her sitting in her chair, hands folded in her lap, staring at nothing. The silence where her practice should be feels like a held breath, like the moment before lightning strikes.

"The woman came again," she says without looking at me. "She said things are progressing nicely. That soon I won't need to worry about remembering anything at all."

I kneel beside her chair, studying her profile in the early light. The translucent quality I noticed yesterday has spread - her skin looks like rice paper held up to a window, thin enough that I can almost see the bones beneath.

"She showed me something else," Grandmother continues, her voice distant. "A place full of shadows and stone creatures. She said it would be peaceful there. No more pain in these old joints. No more struggling to remember forms that used to come as naturally as breathing."

My hands curl into fists. "You're not going anywhere."

"Am I not?" She turns to look at me then, and her eyes are still warm, still unmistakably hers. But there's something crystalline forming at the edges of her irises, like frost spreading across a window. "Look at my hands, little one."

I don't want to look. But I do.

Her fingernails have taken on a grayish tint, and the skin around them looks harder somehow. Not aged - transformed. Like flesh slowly becoming something else entirely.

Stone.

"It doesn't hurt," she says gently, as if comforting me. "It actually feels quite... restful. Like settling into sleep."

At school, I move through classes like a sleepwalker. During chemistry, Billy explains crystalline structures and I think of Grandmother's changing eyes. In gym, we practice balance beam routines and I remember how she used to demonstrate perfect stability, rooted and fluid at once.

"Focus, Trini," Coach Williams calls out when I stumble during a simple walkover. "Where's your center?"

My center. The still point around which everything else moves. The place of perfect balance that Grandmother taught me to find through years of morning practice.

But how do you find your center when the person who taught you balance is slowly turning to stone?

After school, Jason suggests smoothies at the Youth Center. "Team bonding," he calls it, though really it's just an excuse to replay our latest victory over one of Rita's monsters - some oversized thing with crystals for claws that took forty minutes to defeat.

I sit with them, listening to Zack demonstrate his finishing move while Kim laughs and Billy calculates the physics of our Zord combinations. Normal teenage problems. Normal teenage celebrations.

None of them notice that I haven't touched my drink, that my hands shake slightly when I reach for the straw.

None of them see Rita's purple lips smiling back at me from the surface of my untouched smoothie.

—

By the fifth week, Grandmother's transformation is undeniable.

Her legs have solidified from the knees down - not paralyzed, but literally stone. Gray-white calcification that spreads upward like mineral deposits, beautiful and terrible. She can still move her upper body, but each gesture requires tremendous effort, as if she's fighting against her own increasing weight.

"It's moving faster now," she says matter-of-factly as I help her shift position in her chair. Her voice remains steady, but I can feel the stone creeping up her spine through the fabric of her dress. "The woman says it should reach my heart by week's end. After that..."

She doesn't finish. Doesn't need to.

I've been researching frantically - medical journals, mythology, anything that might explain what's happening. But every answer leads back to the same impossible truth: this is magic. Rita's magic, specifically designed to break me by destroying the person I love most.

At the Youth Center, the others practice their usual routines while I sit motionless at a corner table. Jason lands a particularly difficult combination on the parallel bars and calls for me to watch. I nod, make appropriate sounds of approval, but my movements feel mechanical. Disconnected.

"You've been off all week," Kim says, sliding into the seat across from me. "Actually, more than off. You're like... not here."

"I'm here."

"Your body is. But your mind's somewhere else entirely." She leans forward, concern creasing her features. "Talk to me, Trini. What's going on?"

The words almost spill out. The truth sits behind my teeth like poison waiting to escape. But then I remember Rita's warning from last night's dream visit to Grandmother: Tell your little friends and I'll finish what I started before the week is out.

"Just tired," I manage.

Kim studies my face for a long moment, clearly not believing me. But she doesn't push. That's Kim - she knows when to give people space, even when every instinct tells her to dig deeper.

That afternoon, we face another monster. Something with too many eyes and an unfortunate habit of multiplying when struck. Standard Rita tactics - keep us busy with meaningless battles while her real plan unfolds in silence.

I go through the motions. Yellow Ranger powers activate. Martial arts combinations flow like water, precise and controlled. We win, as we always do.

But when Jason suggests celebrating at Ernie's afterward, I make excuses. Need to get home. Family obligations.

The truth: I need to count how many hours Grandmother has left before the stone reaches her heart.

The math is simple. Terrible, but simple.

Seventy-two hours. Maybe less.

—

The putties come at us in the usual formation - mindless clay soldiers with too much enthusiasm and too little strategy. Standard Tuesday afternoon fare, really. Rita's keeping us busy while she plans something bigger, though the others don't know what I know about her real target.

Jason calls out positions. Kim takes the high ground. Billy calculates optimal strike angles. Zack finds his rhythm. I move through the motions - block, strike, kick, spin. Water flowing around obstacles, finding the path of least resistance.

But I'm not really here. Part of me is seventy-two hours in the future, watching Grandmother's heart slow to a stop as gray stone replaces red muscle.

My spinning kick connects with three putties at once. They shatter on impact, clay fragments spinning through the late afternoon air. Golden sunlight catches the pieces as they fall, transforming gray clay into something that glitters like—

Stone. Crystalline fragments. Like chips of granite sparkling in light.

Like pieces of Grandmother.

The sound they make hitting pavement is wrong. Not the dull thud of clay, but sharp clinks. Musical. Like wind chimes made of bone.

Another putty lunges at me. I destroy it without thinking, and more fragments scatter. More pieces that catch the light wrong, that sound wrong when they hit the ground. Each shard a reminder of what's happening to the person I love most.

A third putty attacks from behind. I spin, strike, watch it explode into glittering fragments that remind me of Grandmother's changing eyes, the crystalline frost spreading across her irises.

They keep coming. More putties. More fragments. More reminders that in seventy-two hours, the woman who taught me balance will be nothing but beautiful, lifeless stone.

The sound builds to a crescendo - clink, clink, clink - like a countdown timer made of breaking rock.

Something inside me snaps.

I hear myself screaming before I realize the sound is coming from my throat. Raw, animal noise that has nothing to do with controlled breathing or centered movement. I'm on a putty that's already down, fists connecting with clay that's already cracked, but I can't stop hitting it. Can't stop making it into smaller pieces, smaller fragments, smaller reminders that everything beautiful eventually breaks.

"Trini!" Jason's voice, distant and concerned. "Trini, stop!"

But I can't stop. There's another putty, already defeated, and I'm kicking its remains into powder. Dust. Nothing. Because if I can destroy these stone-like fragments completely, maybe I can change what's happening to Grandmother. Maybe I can reverse time, reverse magic, reverse the inevitable march toward—

Someone grabs my shoulders. Kim's face, pale with shock, saying words I can't process over the roaring in my ears.

I break free, spin toward the next pile of fragments, but there are no more putties. Just my teammates staring at me like I've become something they don't recognize.

Zack's mouth moves. "What the hell was that?"

But I'm already running. Away from their shocked faces, away from questions I can't answer, away from the glittering remains of clay that looked too much like the future I'm powerless to prevent.

I run toward the only target that matters.

Rita.

—

I find Rita exactly where I knew she would be - the old quarry on the outskirts of Angel Grove, surrounded by natural stone formations that amplify magical energy. She stands at the center of a ritual circle carved directly into granite, hands raised toward a crystalline formation that pulses with sickly green light.

"Ah, the Yellow Ranger," she says without turning around. "Right on schedule. I was wondering how long your famous composure would last."

The ritual circle glows brighter. Inside the crystal formation, I can see shadows moving - human shapes frozen in stone. And there, in the center, a familiar silhouette that makes my heart stop.

Grandmother. Already completely transformed, already lost.

"You're too late," Rita continues, her voice sing-song with mock sympathy. "The process is complete. She makes such a lovely statue, don't you think? So peaceful. So... still."

The rage that consumed me during the putty fight crystallizes into something harder, more focused. Like water that's been flowing wild suddenly channeled through a dam, all that scattered energy becoming pure, directed force.

Rita finally turns, purple lips curved in genuine delight. "Tell me, Yellow Ranger - how does it feel to watch helplessly while someone you love turns to stone? How does it feel to know your precious teammates still have no idea why their stable little water-bearer finally cracked?"

She gestures casually toward the crystal formation. "I chose her specifically, you know. Watched your little team for months, looking for the perfect pressure point. The others have obvious weaknesses - Jason's need to protect everyone, Billy's overthinking, Kimberly's perfectionism. But you?"

Rita's laugh echoes off the quarry walls. "You hide your vulnerabilities so well. It took me ages to realize that your greatest strength - that unshakeable calm - was also your weakness. All I had to do was find the one person whose suffering would break it."

I step forward, and Rita raises her hands, power crackling between her fingers.

"Your grandmother was perfect. So dignified in her suffering. So confused when her body began betraying her." Another cruel laugh. "And the best part? You couldn't tell anyone. Couldn't ask for help. Had to watch it happen in complete isolation."

She's right about the isolation. About the helplessness. About how watching Grandmother's transformation in silence nearly destroyed me.

But she's wrong about something crucial.

Breaking isn't always about destruction. Sometimes it's about release.

"The process is complete," Rita says, raising her hands higher. The crystal formation pulses brighter. "She's stone. It can't be reversed."

For weeks, I've been drowning in words I couldn't say. Choking on explanations I couldn't give. Paralyzed by truths I couldn't share.

Now isn't the time for words.

Now is the time to finish this.

I move.

Not the controlled, precise movements of tai chi, but something wilder. Water that's found its true course after being dammed too long. I'm not trying to flow around Rita anymore - I'm carving straight through her.

"Impossible," she snarls, throwing bolts of green energy that I dodge without thinking. "You're broken! I broke you!"

Yes. She did break me.

But water that breaks through a dam doesn't become weaker.

It becomes a flood.

My fist connects with the ritual circle's central stone, and the impact sends shockwaves through the entire formation. The crystal cracks. Light bleeds from the fissures like escaping souls.

"No!" Rita screams, but her voice is already growing distant.

The crystal explodes.

Light everywhere - blinding, cleansing, warm. When it fades, people are stumbling free from stone shells that crumble to dust around them. Dozens of them. Rita's collection, spanning decades of cruelty.

And there, in the center, Grandmother collapses to her knees, flesh and blood again, gasping like someone surfacing from deep water.

Rita is gone. Fled. But I barely notice.

I'm already running to catch Grandmother before she falls.

—

Grandmother's katas begin at five-thirty the next morning.

I hear the whisper of bare feet on hardwood, the careful shift of weight from center to forward stance. But today I don't lie in bed listening - I slip from under my covers and join her in the living room.

She's standing in Mountain Pose, arms at her sides, and when she sees me her face brightens with something I haven't seen in weeks. Joy. Pure, uncomplicated joy.

"Ready to practice, little one?"

We move through the opening sequence together - Brush Knee and Push, Wave Hands Like Clouds, Single Whip. Her movements are careful, deliberate, occasionally trembling. Real trembling this time, the kind that comes from muscles that are seventy years old and have worked hard for every one of those years.

When she wavers during Golden Rooster Stands on One Leg, I reach out instinctively. She catches my hand, steadies herself, laughs.

"Old bones," she says, but the words carry warmth now instead of fear. "Though I suppose they're still my bones."

During Fair Lady Works at Shuttles, she loses the rhythm slightly and has to start the sequence over. I wait patiently, counting breaths, feeling the morning sun warm the floor beneath our bare feet. When she completes the form - not perfectly, but completely - I see tears in her eyes.

"I thought I'd never remember how to move like water again," she whispers.

We finish the practice in comfortable silence, two people who understand the difference between natural imperfection and unnatural transformation. Between aging and being stolen piece by piece.

When we settle into meditation afterward, I notice my own breathing has changed. Less controlled, more... trusting. Like water that's learned it doesn't always need to be contained to be powerful.

"The woman in white," Grandmother says softly, eyes still closed. "She came to my dreams one last time. Do you know what she told me?"

My muscles tense despite everything. "What?"

"That she'd underestimated the power of flowing water." Grandmother opens her eyes, meets my gaze. "Strange thing for a dream to say, don't you think?"

I squeeze her hand - warm, soft, unmistakably human flesh. "Very strange."

We sit together in the growing light, listening to the city wake up around us. Normal sounds. Normal morning. The kind of ordinary miracle I almost lost forever.

—

At school, I notice Kim watching me during lunch with the same careful attention she's shown all week. But today, instead of deflecting or making excuses, I catch her eye and smile.

Really smile, for the first time in weeks.

Her shoulders relax immediately, tension bleeding away like water finding its level. She doesn't ask if I'm okay - she can see that I am. Different than before, carrying new understanding about what can be lost and found again, but present in a way I haven't been since this nightmare began.

Jason laughs at something Zack says, and I find myself laughing too. Not performing normalcy, but actually feeling it. The weight of secrets no longer pressing against my chest like stones.

During our post-lunch walk to class, Billy mentions something about molecular structures and crystalline formation. The words that would have sent me spiraling into panic yesterday just sound like... Billy being Billy. Fascinating and slightly over everyone's head, but harmless.

Safe.

Kim falls into step beside me, and I realize I'm walking differently. Not with the rigid control I've maintained for weeks, but with something more fluid. More like water that's learned to trust its own current.

"Good to have you back," she says quietly.

I don't ask what she means. We both know.

Some silences hold more truth than words ever could.

[tamesg]

Frequencies

The oscilloscope's green line has been stuttering for three hours.

I adjust the frequency dial with my fingertip, watching the wave form try to stabilize on the tiny screen. It should be smooth, predictable - a perfect sine curve tracking the electromagnetic fluctuations I've been monitoring all week. Instead, it jerks and spikes like a heartbeat under stress.

My ham radio crackles softly in the corner, scanning through frequencies on automatic sweep. Mostly static tonight, with the occasional burst of distant conversation bleeding through the atmosphere. "...weather looks clear for the morning commute..." "...copy that, eastbound traffic is..." Normal voices from normal people living normal lives while I sit here surrounded by the electronic pulse of something that definitely isn't normal.

The synthesizer I built last month hums quietly against the far wall, its LED display cycling through the sound patches I programmed. Sixty-four different voices, each one mapped to specific harmonic frequencies I calculated by hand. Six weeks of work, soldering each connection point with the precision of a surgeon. It can replicate sounds that don't exist in nature - perfect mathematical constructions of tone and timbre.

But tonight, even my perfectly calculated harmonics feel wrong. The air itself feels dense, charged with potential energy that my instruments can measure but can't explain. Like the moment before lightning strikes, but stretched across hours instead of seconds.

I lean back in my desk chair, and it creaks against the weight of too many late nights spent exactly like this. Monitoring. Measuring. Trying to quantify fluctuations that keep shifting just outside the range of logical analysis. In the corner, under a plastic dust cover, sit the components for the project I was working on before all this started. Three months of planning, circuit diagrams I sketched and re-sketched until they were perfect. I haven't touched it in two weeks - can't afford the distraction when something this big is building toward Angel Grove.

The communicator on my wrist stays silent, but that doesn't mean anything. Rita's attacks don't always announce themselves with dramatic flourishes. Sometimes they build slowly, accumulating power in frequencies most people can't detect.

Sometimes they feel exactly like this.

—

By midnight, the fluctuations have pattern - no, structure. Mathematical relationships that shouldn't exist in random electromagnetic noise.

I pull out my notebook, the one with graph paper that I use for calculations too complex for mental math. Each square represents a precise measurement, and I've been plotting the readings for the past hour. The numbers should scatter randomly across the grid, but instead they're forming something that looks almost like...

I stop. Stare at the page. Count the intervals again.

It's a frequency progression. Not random at all, but building toward something specific - a resonance point that would amplify whatever signal is generating these readings by a factor of twelve. Maybe fifteen, if my calculations are right.

And they're always right.

My throat goes dry as I flip to a fresh page, running the numbers again with more precision this time. Checking my work twice, then three times. The math doesn't change. In approximately thirty hours, when the sun comes up tomorrow and the atmospheric conditions shift, Angel Grove is going to become a giant antenna for whatever Rita's been building.

The ham radio crackles with sudden static, and I spin the dial manually, trying to isolate the interference. Nothing. Nothing. Then - voices. Distant, distorted, speaking in a language that makes my spine crawl.

I reach for my portable frequency analyzer, the one I built to identify unknown signals. It's connected to my main computer setup, drawing power from the same modified batteries that run my synthesizer and oscilloscope. The whole system hums with quiet efficiency, LEDs blinking in steady rhythms that usually calm me.

Tonight, they feel like countdown timers.

The analyzer locks onto the signal, and numbers cascade across its tiny screen. Frequency, amplitude, modulation pattern - all the data I need to understand exactly what I'm hearing. But understanding it makes everything worse.

It's a summoning protocol. Rita isn't just planning an attack. She's calling something to Angel Grove. Something big enough to require a city-wide amplification array.

And I know exactly how to stop it.

—

The Youth Center smells like disinfectant and teenage sweat, but underneath that, something else. Something metallic that crawls up my nostrils and settles behind my teeth. I've been sitting at this table for twenty-three minutes, and the smell keeps getting stronger.

Across the room, Jason spots Tommy on the bench press. The barbell clanks against the support brackets every time Tommy racks it - a sharp, percussive sound that travels through the floor, up through my chair, into my spine. Clank. Fifteen-second rest. Clank. Each impact feels like it's happening inside my skull.

My calculator sits open beside my notebook, numbers scattered across the page in increasingly frantic handwriting. Power requirements. Frequency calculations. The exact amperage needed to disrupt Rita's signal at 6:47 AM, when the atmospheric conditions align and Angel Grove becomes her amplification array.

"Billy?" Trini's voice cuts through the ambient noise, and I look up to find her standing beside my table with two smoothies. Strawberry-banana, by the color. "You've been here since we opened. Ernie's worried you're going to wear a hole in his table."

The smoothie glass is sweating condensation, droplets sliding down the side and pooling on the table's surface. When Trini sets it down, the liquid inside sloshes against the walls - chunks of fruit suspended in artificial thickness, bits of banana floating like organic debris. The pink foam at the top has already started to separate, revealing the mechanical process of blending, the violence done to create something supposedly refreshing.

"Thanks," I manage, but my voice sounds strange. Too loud. Too precise.

Behind Trini, Kimberly dismounts from the parallel bars, her sneakers hitting the mat with a sound like small explosions. She adjusts her grip tape, the adhesive making tiny ripping sounds as she repositions it. Each noise feels amplified, processed through hypersensitive audio receptors that won't shut off.

Zack's boom box plays something with a steady four-four beat, but I can hear the digital compression in the high frequencies, the way the speakers distort slightly on the bass drops. Ninety-six beats per minute. Exactly. Which means at current tempo, Rita's summoning will begin in four hundred and thirty-two songs.

If the playlist doesn't change.

Trini slides into the chair across from me, her movements creating tiny vibrations that travel through the table's metal legs. The smoothie in front of me wobbles, pink surface tension broken by microscopic waves.

"What are you working on?" She leans forward, and I can smell her shampoo - something floral with chemical undertones that remind me of the ester compounds I use for circuit board cleaning. "You missed first period. And second."

I blink at her, trying to process the words. School. Right. There was supposed to be school today. But how can anyone think about trigonometry when Angel Grove has mere hours before it becomes a giant resonance chamber?

"Billy?" Her voice is softer now, concerned. She reaches across the table, and her fingers are warm when they touch my wrist. Human temperature. Ninety-eight point six degrees. The contact sends signals up my arm that feel too intense, too immediate.

"I'm fine," I say, but the words come out wrong again. Clipped. Mechanical.

Across the room, Jason finishes his set and the weights crash into their rests with a sound like breaking metal. The echo bounces off the walls, ceiling, floor - ricocheting through the space in a pattern I can almost map if I concentrate. Sound waves traveling at eleven hundred and twenty-five feet per second through air at current temperature and humidity.

Trini's fingers are still on my wrist, and I realize she's counting my pulse. Which means she can feel how fast my heart is beating, how the rhythm has been irregular since midnight when I first ran the calculations.

"When's the last time you slept?"

Sleep. Another normal human requirement that feels impossible when you know exactly how many minutes remain before catastrophe. I try to remember lying down, closing my eyes, but all I can recall is the oscilloscope's stuttering green line and the growing certainty that everything I've built is about to become the only thing standing between Angel Grove and annihilation.

"Trini, I need to tell you something." The words come out too fast, compressed like data through a narrow bandwidth. "I've been monitoring electromagnetic fluctuations in the subsonic range, and there's a resonance frequency building that correlates directly with atmospheric ionization patterns consistent with large-scale thaumaturgic amplification."

She leans forward, following every word, but I'm dimly aware of movement around us. Chairs scraping. The soft thud of gym bags being set down.

"The readings indicate Rita's implementing a city-wide signal enhancement protocol using Angel Grove's infrastructure as a passive antenna array. At 6:47 AM, when solar radiation creates optimal conductivity conditions, she'll have enough amplification to summon something with a power coefficient approximately twelve times greater than her usual manifestation parameters."

"Billy." Kim's voice cuts through my data stream. I look up to find all of them gathered around the table. "In normal words. What's happening?"

Trini glances between me and the others. "Rita's turning Angel Grove into a giant antenna. Tomorrow morning, she's going to use it to call something big."

Jason's face goes serious immediately. "How big?"

I check my calculations one more time, though the numbers haven't changed in the last three hours. "Twelve to fifteen times her normal manifestation capacity. Maybe more, depending on atmospheric conditions."

Zack lets out a low whistle. "That's... that's like, Megazord-sized from the start."

"Bigger," I say quietly. "Much bigger."

But then Jason leans forward, and I can see the tactical wheels turning in his head. "You said you know how to stop her?"

The question hangs in the air, and suddenly everyone's looking at me. Waiting. Trusting that I have a solution because I always have a solution.

"Yes," I manage. "I know exactly how to stop her."

—

The Command Center's crystalline walls pulse with soft light, each facet catching and refracting the energy that flows through Zordon's systems. I stand at the viewing globe, watching it cycle through images of Angel Grove - morning traffic patterns, power grid layouts, the precise geometric arrangements of buildings that Rita will use as her amplification array.

"Explain it to us again, Billy," Jason says, his voice carrying that edge it gets when he's processing tactical information. "In detail this time."

I touch the control console, and holographic displays materialize around us. Frequency charts, power distribution maps, mathematical models that show exactly how Rita's plan will unfold. The others gather closer, trusting me to make sense of the impossible.

"At 6:47 AM, solar radiation will create optimal ionospheric conditions," I begin, my voice steady despite everything churning inside my chest. "Rita's been seeding the city's electrical infrastructure with harmonic resonators - tiny devices that will turn every power line, every circuit, every piece of metal into part of a massive antenna array."

The hologram shifts, showing wave patterns cascading across Angel Grove's grid. Beautiful, in its way. Elegant. Completely devastating.

"When the signal reaches critical amplification, she'll have enough power to breach dimensional barriers and summon something..." I pause, checking my calculations one more time. "Something that would make our largest Zord combinations look like toys. We're talking about a manifestation that could level city blocks just by existing."

The silence that follows feels heavy with the weight of impossible odds.

"But I can stop it," I say quietly. "I've calculated the exact counter-frequency needed to disrupt her signal before the dimensional breach occurs."

Kim steps forward from where she's been quietly studying the holographic displays. "That sounds almost too good to be true," she says, and there's something in her voice - the same careful precision she uses when she's analyzing a particularly difficult routine. "What do you need to make it work?"

The question I've been dreading. The one that makes everything real.

"Power," I say simply. "Massive amounts of electrical power, channeled through a precise harmonic generator capable of producing the exact counter-frequency needed to disrupt Rita's signal."

Jason nods, already thinking tactically. "The Command Center's got plenty of power. Can we route it through your equipment?"

Back home, my synthesizer sits quiet in the corner, its LED display dark for the first time in months. I built those sound patches to explore frequencies that don't exist in nature, mathematical constructions of pure tone. Each one represents hours of calculation, weeks of fine-tuning. In my mind, I can feel the weight of its keys under my fingers, the satisfying click of switches I soldered myself.

Soon, those keys will never make sound again.

"The Command Center's power systems operate on completely different principles," I explain, my voice steady despite the growing hollow feeling in my chest. "What I need is stored electrical energy - batteries that can discharge their entire capacity in a controlled burst. Fortunately, I have sufficient power reserves at home."

Back home, my ham radio will fall silent mid-scan. My frequency analyzer will lose power halfway through a calculation that will never matter again. Every device I've built, every circuit I've perfected, will become nothing more than empty shells. But they'll give their stored energy to save Angel Grove.

"Fortunately," I repeat, and the word tastes like ash.

Zack grins. "Leave it to Billy to have a stockpile of super-batteries just lying around."

If only he knew.

—

The house is quiet when I slip through the back door at 5:30 AM. My parents won't wake for another hour, which gives me time to do what needs to be done without explanations I can't give.

My bedroom feels different in the pre-dawn darkness. Smaller. The familiar constellation of LED lights that usually comforts me - power indicators, display panels, status lights blinking in steady rhythms - seems fragile now. Temporary. Like stars that are about to burn out all at once.

I don't turn on the main light. Instead, I work by the glow of my equipment, each device casting its own colored shadow across the walls. The oscilloscope's green trace, the synthesizer's amber display, the soft blue pulse of my computer's power indicator. A rainbow of electronics that has been my constant companion for years.

The frequency analyzer goes first. I kneel beside it, feeling for the battery compartment with fingers that know every curve and edge of its plastic housing. The screws are small, precise - Phillips head, size 0, exactly the kind I've turned a thousand times before. But tonight, each turn feels final. Irreversible.

The compartment opens with a soft click, and I can smell the metallic tang of the power cell inside. Months of work, reverse-engineering the power cells from the remains of that crystalline monster we destroyed last year, calculating how to adapt its alien energy matrix to terrestrial electronics. The electrolyte isn't earthly - some kind of mineral suspension that holds charge at impossible densities, remnants of Rita's dimensional magic crystallized into pure stored power. My fingertips brush against the warm metal casing, feeling the subtle harmonic vibration that means interdimensional energy waiting to be released.

When I lift the first power cell out, it's heavier than it should be. Not because of its physical weight, but because of everything it represents. Hours spent analyzing crystalline fragments under my microscope. Late nights trying to understand how dimensional magic could be converted into electrical current. The breakthrough moment when I finally achieved stable power output for the first time.

The analyzer's display flickers once as I disconnect the power, then goes dark. The absence of light feels like a small death.

Next is my synthesizer. The power compartment is built into its base, accessible through a panel I designed with thumb screws instead of Phillips heads - easier access for when I needed to swap power cells during long composition sessions. The alien energy matrices hum differently in the synthesizer, their harmonic vibrations creating subtle interference patterns that actually improved the sound quality. Happy accidents born from technology I barely understand.

The screws turn easily, well-oiled from frequent use. Inside, two more crystalline power cells rest in custom-fitted cradles, their surfaces catching the synthesizer's amber display light like captured stars. When I lift them out, the synthesizer's LEDs dim and fade, sixty-four perfect voices falling silent all at once.

—

By 6:45 AM, I'm crouched in the empty lot behind the high school with a device that looks like it was built from spare parts. Which, in a way, it was. The crystalline power cells sit in a jury-rigged harness connected to a frequency generator I assembled from components salvaged from three different pieces of equipment. Wires snake between circuit boards held together with electrical tape and hope.

It's ugly. Inelegant. Everything I usually am not.

But the mathematics are perfect. I've checked the calculations seventeen times in the past hour, and the numbers don't lie. At exactly 6:47 AM, when Rita's signal reaches critical amplification, this improvised monstrosity will discharge every joule of alien energy I've collected over the past year in a single, precisely-tuned burst.

The morning air is crisp against my skin, carrying the smell of dew and distant traffic. Normal Angel Grove waking up to what they think is another normal day. They have no idea that in two minutes, their city was supposed to become a beacon for something that could have erased them from existence.

Then the air itself begins to vibrate with a frequency I can feel in my bones. Street lights flicker in sequence down the block, their rhythm matching the pulse I've been tracking all week. In the distance, car alarms start going off one by one, triggered by electromagnetic interference that's building toward something massive.

Rita's signal is reaching critical mass.

My communicator crackles softly. "Billy, you in position?" Jason's voice, tense with the kind of focus he gets before major battles.

"Affirmative," I reply, though my throat feels dry. "Counter-frequency device is online and ready."

"Readings show Rita's signal building to critical mass," comes Trini's voice. She's monitoring from the Command Center, watching the same electromagnetic patterns I've been tracking for days. "Thirty seconds to amplification threshold."

I place my hand on the activation switch - a simple toggle I salvaged from my ham radio. Fitting, somehow, that the final component should come from the first electronic device I ever truly understood.

Twenty seconds.

I think about my parents, still asleep in the house six blocks away. When they wake up in an hour, they'll find my bedroom door closed, my equipment silent for the first time in years. The project under the dust cover will stay under that cover forever now - no power source advanced enough to make it work.

Ten seconds.

I think about the other Rangers, probably suited up and ready to mobilize if my plan fails. Jason checking his team positions one last time. Kim running through battle sequences in her mind. Zack finding his rhythm, preparing to move. Trini calculating backup strategies with the same methodical precision I've always admired.

Five seconds.

Tommy, wherever he is, probably just hoping he'll be ready if they need him.

Three.

Two.

One.

I flip the switch.

—

The Youth Center's acoustics feel different when you're not monitoring for electromagnetic interference. Conversations blend into ambient noise instead of distinct frequency patterns that need analysis. Jason's voice carries across the space at approximately seventy-five decibels, animated with the kind of energy that follows successful crisis resolution.

"You should have seen Billy's contraption," he says, hands gesturing to approximate dimensions that are definitely incorrect for my actual device. "Wires everywhere, looked like it was held together with—"

"Electrical tape and prayer," Zack finishes, the ice in his smoothie clinking against glass as he raises it in mock celebration. "To Billy Cranston, master of making impossible things work."

The smoothie Ernie brought me sits untouched, condensation forming perfect droplets that slide down the glass in predictable paths governed by surface tension and gravity. Strawberry-banana. The same artificial pink I watched separate in the blender yesterday, when normal fruit processing felt like violence.

My notebook lies open on the table's metal surface, and I can feel the slight vibration from Zack's movements traveling through the frame. The graph paper beneath my pencil is standard twenty-squares-per-inch grid, nothing like the custom plotting sheets I used for complex calculations. Each square represents simpler possibilities now.

The pencil in my hand is a Number 2 Ticonderoga, wood-body construction with standard graphite core. When I press it against paper, the resistance feels different than it used to. Not the confident pressure of someone designing systems that interface with alien technology, but the careful touch of someone learning to sketch basic circuits again.

Kim's laugh registers at a frequency that would have triggered automatic analysis protocols yesterday. Today, it's just the sound of someone happy that Angel Grove still exists.

"I still can't believe Rita thought she could turn the whole city into some kind of giant antenna," she says. "Like, who even thinks of that?"

"Billy does," Trini says, but her voice comes from closer than the others. When I look up, she's studying the corner of my schematic - just the edge visible where I've been sketching a simple oscilloscope design. Single-trace display, basic time-base circuitry, nothing that requires interdimensional power sources.

Her eyes move from the drawing to my face, and I see recognition there. Not questions about what I sacrificed, not concern about whether I'm okay, but understanding of what this sketch represents. Beginning again with pencil marks instead of alien crystals.

She reaches across the table, and when her fingers touch my hand, they're warm - ninety-eight point six degrees, standard human temperature, perfectly normal in a way that feels extraordinary after three days of measuring catastrophe.

"Nice work today, Billy," she says.

The pressure of her touch lasts exactly two seconds before she pulls back, but the warmth lingers on my skin. Behind us, Bulk's collision with Skull registers as predictable kinetic energy transfer, the kind of everyday physics that doesn't threaten to unmake reality.

I return my pencil to the paper. The lines are getting steadier, and for the first time in days, that feels like enough.

[tamesg]

Five Days

It's been three days since the last attack, and the silence sits heavy in my chest.

Trini turns her algebra test face-down, but I already saw the red C+ bleeding through the paper. Her fingers stay flat against the desktop for a moment longer than necessary, and when she lifts her hand, there's a pale print left behind in the morning condensation.

I know that pressure. The way stress builds in fingertips when you're trying to hold everything together. Trini handles pressure better than any of us in battle - has to, with the precision her Zord demands. But she's also harder on herself than she needs to be. A C+ in algebra shouldn't matter when you're saving the world, but doubt doesn't follow logic. It finds its way in through any opening.

To my left, Billy adjusts his glasses again. The metal frames catch fluorescent light, throwing brief flashes across his desk. His fingertips linger on the bridge, pressing.

Behind me, Zack's pen clicks in stuttering bursts - not the steady four-four time that usually runs through everything he does, but something broken, scattered.

Kimberly raises her hand to answer a question about factoring. Her voice comes out clear, confident - the same tone she uses when calling out Zord commands. But I've been watching her rewrite notes in the margin, erasing and starting over. The paper's worn thin in spots where she's pressed too hard with the eraser. I know that need for perfection. On the balance beam, it serves her well. In battle, it can save lives. But sometimes perfectionism becomes paralysis, and I've seen what happens when she second-guesses a split-second decision.

Mrs. Patterson turns back to the board, chalk dust settling like fine snow across everything. It coats my textbook, my hands, gets under my fingernails. Three days of normal high school problems, normal high school dust, and it feels wrong. Too quiet. Too simple. Angel Grove doesn't stay simple for long.

The bell rings - sharp, sudden. Everyone moves at once, books slamming shut, chairs scraping against linoleum. Normal sounds, but my body tenses anyway. Any sudden sound could be the beginning. Any moment of chaos could be the cover Rita needs.

I watch my team file out with the crowd. Trini folds her test paper into precise thirds before tucking it away. Billy checks his watch one more time. Zack's rhythm comes back as he talks to someone about weekend plans, but I heard that broken beat. I know what it means when the music stops.

We have three more days until the weekend. In Angel Grove, that's a lifetime.

—

The hallway stretches ahead of us, fluorescent lights humming in that frequency that makes your teeth ache. I count the newer tiles automatically - twelve in a row where the floor split open last spring. They're a shade lighter than the originals, just enough to notice if you know what to look for.

Kimberly stops at her locker, spinning the combination with practiced ease. "So, anyone else think that algebra test was brutal?" Her voice is light, casual, but her shoulders are set too straight.

"Could've been worse," Zack says, but his fingers tap against his locker door - that same broken rhythm from class.

To my right, Billy nods, adjusting his glasses again. "The quadratic equations were... challenging." What he doesn't say: challenging like calculating trajectory angles mid-battle. What none of us say: everything feels challenging when you're waiting for the world to end.

Down the hall, Bulk crashes into Skull near the water fountain. Normal chaos. Normal disaster. I watch them untangle themselves, and something in my chest loosens just slightly. Some patterns you can count on.

Trini joins us, sliding her algebra test into her backpack like she's filing evidence. "Anyone want to study together this weekend?" The question hangs in the air. We all know what weekends mean in Angel Grove - more time for attacks, fewer witnesses, empty streets that make good battlefields.

"Sure," Tommy says, appearing beside Billy's locker. His voice carries that casual confidence he's had since joining us - like weekend plans are just weekend plans, like Angel Grove operates on a normal teenage schedule. He leans against the metal door, relaxed in a way that makes my shoulders tense. When he shifts his weight, it's not toward the exit but deeper into the conversation, settling in like he has all the time in the world.

Billy closes his locker with more force than necessary. The metallic bang echoes down the hallway, sharp enough to make several students glance over. "Sorry," he murmurs, but his hand lingers on the handle. Testing the mechanism, maybe. Making sure it'll open quickly if he needs to grab something fast.

Down the hall, Bulk and Skull are arguing about lunch plans. Their voices carry - something about pizza versus burgers, the kind of meaningless debate that fills normal high school days. The sound should be comforting. Instead, it just reminds me how long it's been since any of us worried about something that simple.

"Three days," Kimberly says quietly, then catches herself. "I mean... three days until the weekend. Feels like forever."

We all know what she really means.

The warning bell rings, and we scatter like we've been practicing. Tommy's green jacket disappears into the stream of bodies, swallowed by the crowd before I can track where he's going. He does that - appears beside Billy's locker like he materialized from nowhere, shows up at Ernie's when you least expect him, then vanishes just as suddenly. I never know where he'll be when the communicators buzz, never know if he'll answer on the first call or the third. More firepower when he shows up, but firepower you can't depend on feels worse than none at all. Another variable spinning in my head, another place where our formation could crack open.

My locker sticks on the second try. The metal groans under pressure - warped from when those vines punched through the walls last month, leaving the doors slightly twisted in their frames. I work the handle with the specific angle I've learned, feeling the catch give way under my thumb.

Inside, my textbooks lean against each other in perfect rows. Spanish, Chemistry, History - corners bent from being stuffed into backpacks, margins filled with half-erased notes about conjugations and chemical bonds. Normal damage from normal use. But there, wedged behind my calculator where the morning light can barely reach it, my communicator sits forgotten. Silver metal that should be pressed against my wrist, warm with body heat and ready to pulse with Rita's next attack. The weight of forgetting it sits heavier in my stomach than the device ever does on my arm.

I reach for the communicator, the metal cool against my fingertips, warming as I lift it. The band slides over my hand with the slight resistance of metal against skin, catching briefly on the fine hairs of my wrist before settling into the groove it's worn there. The weight distributes around the bone, familiar pressure that makes my pulse beat against silver. The digital display shows 8:47 as I adjust the clasp - forty-three hours since the last attack. In Angel Grove, that's not just time passing. It's a countdown.

—

By Thursday, the silence has teeth.

During lunch, I watch the daily dance happen without anyone acknowledging it. Trini enters the cafeteria, scans the room, then chooses the table closest to the emergency exit. She doesn't rush, doesn't look obvious about it - just naturally gravitates toward the spot with the clearest escape route. Billy follows a minute later, settles where he can see both entrances, his back to the wall but angled so he won't miss anyone coming through the main doors.

Kim slides into the seat that lets her survey the whole room, the one where a thrown lunch tray can't catch her off-guard. When Zack joins us, he takes the chair that keeps his hands free, doesn't trap him between table and wall. We've never discussed these choices, never consciously mapped out our positions like battle strategy. But we all know. Doesn't matter how many putties you've crushed or how many times you've brought down a monster the size of an office building - all it takes is one moment to end it all. Power doesn't make you invincible. It just makes you a bigger target when you finally make a mistake.

But Tommy sits wherever there's an empty chair, sprawls like he owns the place. During third period Physics, while Billy's hands shake retrieving his dropped pencil for the second time this week, Tommy's doodling band logos in his notebook margin. While Kim rewrites equations with increasingly desperate precision, her eraser wearing holes in the paper, Tommy's humming under his breath - some song from the radio, normal and carefree and completely wrong for the weight pressing down on the rest of us.

He doesn't feel it yet.

And maybe that's the problem - not that he's relaxed, but that I can't tell if his calm comes from confidence or ignorance. Is he centered enough to stay steady when chaos hits, or is he going to freeze the first time a real threat breaks through our defenses? His powers are stronger than any of ours, but strength without awareness gets people killed. Gets teammates killed.

Or maybe I'm the one losing perspective. Maybe I'm cataloguing his every casual gesture like evidence, building a case against him from nothing but pencil marks and hummed melodies. Maybe watching him lean back in his chair without checking the exits makes me feel like I'm failing at something I can't even name.

But no. This is what leadership means - reading the room, reading your team, trusting what you see even when it's uncomfortable. Four days of quiet has everyone else wound tight as piano wire, and Tommy's acting like it's summer vacation. That disconnect matters. When the attack comes, it will matter.

He doesn't feel it yet. The way Angel Grove holds its breath before it screams.

—

By Friday afternoon, every sound is a threat.

The PA system crackles to life during second period, the speaker above the whiteboard spitting static that raises the hair on my arms. My hand moves toward my communicator before I can stop it, fingers already curved to match the device's shape. Principal Caplan's voice fills the classroom: "Attention students, please disregard the—"

Static. Dead air that presses against my eardrums. Then nothing.

Across the room, Billy's head snaps up from his chemistry notes. For three seconds, we all wait. Mrs. Patterson taps her pen against the whiteboard, annoyed at the interruption. Students shift in their seats, already losing interest. But Billy's eyes find mine, and I see my own tension reflected back.

The PA crackles again. "—maintenance issue in the east wing. Carry on with your classes."

Just maintenance. Just a glitch in forty-year-old speakers. But my heart is still hammering when the announcement ends, and I catch Kim's subtle exhale two rows over. She heard it too. Felt that split second when Angel Grove almost became something else.

During lunch, Zack drops his sandwich tray. The crash of plastic hitting linoleum echoes through the cafeteria like a gunshot, and this time I'm not the only one who flinches. The sound travels up through the floor, into the metal legs of our table, vibrating against my forearms where they rest on the surface. Trini's hand freezes halfway to her mouth, fork suspended in mid-air. Billy's glasses slip down his nose as his head jerks toward the sound. Even Kim pauses in her careful arrangement of carrot sticks.

For one heartbeat, we're all perfectly still. All listening. All waiting.

Then Zack laughs it off, bends to clean up the mess, and the moment dissolves. But when he straightens, when his eyes sweep across our table, there's something there. Recognition. Understanding.

Tommy keeps eating his apple.

By final period, the weight of not talking about it has become its own presence in the room. We're in History, supposedly learning about the Civil War, but I'm watching Trini trace the same circle on her notebook margin over and over. Her pen clicks each time she completes the loop - a nervous tic I've never seen before. Next to her, Kim's eraser has worn a hole clean through her paper.

Mr. Vargas drones on about battle strategies while Billy adjusts his glasses with increasing frequency. Every thirty seconds now, like he's trying to keep the world in focus through sheer repetition. Behind me, Zack's breathing has gotten shallow, controlled. The kind of breathing you do when you're trying not to hyperventilate.

"The key to winning any conflict," Mr. Vargas says, "is knowing when to strike."

The words hang in the air like a challenge. Like a prediction.

I catch Kim's eye. She's looking at me with an expression that says everything we can't: Do you feel it too? This waiting? This certainty that something's coming? I give the smallest nod, and relief flickers across her face. Not relief that something's coming, but relief that she's not losing her mind alone.

Trini stops tracing circles. Billy's hand hovers over his glasses without adjusting them. For one moment, we're all perfectly synchronized in our shared dread.

Then the janitor wheels his cart past the window - metal buckets clanging against each other, mop handles rattling - and every muscle in my body coils for action. My hand jerks toward my communicator, fingertips already searching for the familiar texture of the band. My legs bunch under the desk, thighs pressed against the plastic chair edge, ready to launch.

It's just the janitor. Just the afternoon cleaning routine. Just normal sounds that shouldn't make me feel like the world is about to split open.

Tommy glances over at my sudden movement, eyebrows raised in mild confusion. Then he turns back to his notes, already dismissing whatever he saw as irrelevant.

I force my hand away from my wrist, but the damage is done. The room feels smaller now, the air thinner. Like we're all holding our breath underwater, and the surface is getting further away.

—

The fire alarm splits the air like a scream.

Every nerve in my body explodes into action before my brain catches up. My hand slams against my communicator, checking for the pulse that means Zordon's calling. Nothing. Just the steady digital heartbeat of normal time passing.

Around me, chairs scrape against linoleum as students stand, grumbling about another drill. Mr. Vargas sighs and gestures toward the door with practiced resignation. "You know the routine, people. Single file, no talking."

But this isn't routine. Can't be routine. Five days of waiting, five days of Angel Grove holding its breath, and now this piercing wail that sounds exactly like every other fire drill but feels like the end of everything.

I catch Billy's eye as we file toward the door. His face is pale, focused, scanning the hallway like he's calculating attack vectors instead of evacuation routes. Behind him, Kim moves with too much precision, each step deliberate, controlled. Battle-ready.

Trini falls into step beside me, close enough that I can feel the tension radiating from her shoulders. "Just a drill," she murmurs, but her voice carries the same uncertainty that's eating me alive.

"Just a drill," I agree, but my eyes are already tracking exit routes, cataloguing potential choke points, counting heads to make sure we don't lose anyone in the chaos.

The hallway fills with students - hundreds of bodies moving in the same direction, creating exactly the kind of confusion Rita loves to exploit. Perfect cover for putties. Perfect distraction for whatever nightmare she's been planning while Angel Grove held its breath.

Tommy appears beside us, hands shoved casually in his pockets. "Man, they always pick the worst times for these things," he says, like we're just inconvenienced teenagers instead of warriors waiting for war.

The alarm keeps shrieking. My communicator stays silent.

Outside, we cluster on the basketball courts with the rest of the school. Principal Caplan stands by the building with his clipboard, checking off teachers as they report their classes safe. Mrs. Patterson. Mr. Vargas. Coach Schmidt. All accounted for. All normal.

I scan the crowd, looking for the wrong face, the figure that doesn't belong. But it's just students and teachers, everyone exactly where they should be. Bulk and Skull stand near the gym doors, looking bored and slightly annoyed. Normal. Everything's normal.

"Probably just a pulled alarm," Zack says, but his eyes keep moving, searching. "Some freshman prank."

Five minutes pass. Then ten. My muscles ache from staying coiled, ready to spring into action that isn't coming. The concrete beneath my feet radiates heat through my sneakers, and sweat gathers at the base of my neck despite the afternoon breeze. Around us, conversations start up again - complaints about missing tests, jokes about the timing. The normalcy scratches against my eardrums like static.

Billy checks his watch. "Fifteen minutes. Usually they're shorter."

"Maybe there really was something this time," Kim says, but she doesn't sound convinced. None of us do.

Twenty minutes. The alarm finally stops, leaving behind a silence that feels heavier than the noise. Principal Caplan raises his megaphone.

"All clear, everyone. Please return to your classrooms in an orderly fashion."

That's it. All clear. Just a drill. Just another normal Angel Grove Friday afternoon where nothing happened and nothing changed and nothing tried to destroy the city.

The crowd starts moving back toward the building. Students laugh and complain and pick up conversations where they left off. Tommy stretches his arms over his head like he's been sitting too long in a movie theater.

"Well, that was exciting," he says with a grin that makes me want to shake him.

I follow the crowd back inside, my communicator heavy on my wrist, my shoulders finally starting to unknot. Just a drill. Maybe I really have been losing it. Maybe five days of waiting for disaster has made me see threats where there aren't any. Maybe—

The building shakes.

Not an earthquake. Not construction. Something deliberate that travels up through the floor, through my legs, settling in my chest like a struck tuning fork. Something wrong. The lights flicker once, twice, then steady, but the fluorescent hum has changed pitch.

My communicator explodes into life, red light bleeding through my skin, the sharp beeping cutting through the hallway noise like a blade. The metal grows warm with each pulse of light, each burst of sound - a rhythm I know by heart, alive against my wrist like a second heartbeat finally synchronized with my own.

Around me, five other communicators light up in perfect unison. For one impossible second, our secret hangs naked in the fluorescent air.

Then training kicks in. Billy dives behind a bank of lockers, already reaching for his communicator. Kim sprints toward the nearest exit, her hair finally flying loose behind her. Trini's moving before the beeping ends, heading for cover with the fluid precision I've been waiting to see all week.

Zack grabs Tommy's arm, pulling him toward the emergency exit. For just a moment, Tommy's eyes go wide — not with confusion this time, but with something sharper. Fear. Recognition. Then his jaw sets. When he moves, it's with the same precision as the rest of us. "Come on, man. Now."

And me? I'm running too, but for the first time in five days, I'm not running away from something.

I'm running toward it.

[tamesg]

Okay, but What About Sade?

In a previous post, where I strangely compared relationships to living inside music videos, I wrote:

There are other music genres out there, and other music videos, and those are fine. But there isn’t another 20-second run in any of them that’s as cool as (Chilli in TLC's Hat 2 da Back official music video).

But then I opened up YouTube and wouldn't you know it - there's Sade.

Sade isn't Chilli. You can't compare the two; they're apples and oranges (Sade is oranges). But as I enter my 40s, maybe I want more of what happens here, at 3:46, and to feel the way I do when she picks back up at 4:05. If you want to know what that looks like for yourself, then rewind a little, to 1:47, and look at that couple.

The sky was full of love.

[tamesg]

Speaking of Gwen

People say that it's smells that are most nostalgic, that the olfactory bulb's direct link to the hippocampus and amygdala make smells extremely effective triggers for vivid, emotional memories from the past.

I must have some sort of ear>nose synesthesia, then, or an even directer link from my ears to my amygdala and hippocampus, because whatever Gwen's doing at 2:50 rockets me back to 2016, somewhere between Alberta and Saskatchewan, every single time.

[tamesg]

On Being Single

Last week, over coffee, a friend asked me why I’m single.

I said something about only dating to marry, that no girl recently has done it for me, etc. The usual. And all of that’s true, but it’s not accurate. It’s not that I don’t know why: I do, and answer sprang to mind immediately. It’s just not the sort of thing I could verbalize. 

But this is the internet, where I can link things, so take a look at this:

I encourage you to watch the whole thing, because TLC were/are just great. But, the real magic happens at 2:39. If you’re going to skip to it, skip to a little before, to put 2:39 into context.

It is impossible to watch this and not fall in love with Chilli, or at least, this image of her. She’s effortlessly cool. She’s sweet, but also, no she’s not. I’ll stop before I start, here, because I don’t want to sound weird.

But the point I’m making is this: life with my ex was like living with Chilli from 2:39 in the Hat 2 da Back official music video. Eight years of my life were filled with this sort of energy and it’s like the world had a soundtrack and that soundtrack was from 1992, which, coincidentally, was the year my ex was born. It's pretty hard to compete with that. There are other music genres out there, and other music videos, and those are fine. But there isn't another 20-second run in any of them that's as cool as this (though Gwen Stefani can sometimes come pretty close). So unless and until that changes, and someone comes along who makes me feel like I'm inside that music video: I'm staying single.

[tamesg]

Friday Night

I’d been watching the swell and crash of the waves for what felt like hours. They moved with an almost mechanical precision - too regular, almost, like the breathing of someone deeply asleep. Foam gathered at their edges, neither quite white nor yellow, but a colour that seemed to resist definition. My eyes had begun to ache from the watching, and I couldn’t remember blinking. It was then that I was pulled back to reality by the sound of my friend’s voice: ‘I’m going to do it,’ he said. 

‘Sorry?’ I asked, and narrowed my eyes at him.

‘I’m going to turn someone into a chicken,’ he said, and gave a slight shrug. ‘I just this second decided to.'

The words sounded like a joke, like something someone would say to get a laugh, or for shock value. But something about the way he said them made me wonder whether he was serious; there was a cool nonchalance about him, as though this - turning people into chickens - were something obvious, routine. 

‘What do you mean?’

He shrugged again. ‘It’s easy. I’ve been working as a hypnotist for a while. And people like to joke.’ He looked directly at me, or maybe through me. ‘You’ve even joked. “Ohh, don't make eye contact with me! I don’t wanna become a chicken or anything, haha!”’

‘It's an odd profession, that's all. Or, unusual.’

His lips crept into a smile at the word ‘odd’. He lit a cigarette, and watched the flame for several seconds longer than necessary. ‘What if I did it, though?’

‘But that’s crazy talk.’ From across the balcony, I could feel the heat of the cigarette reach me, though I knew this was impossible.

He took a drag on that same cigarette. ‘Is it?’

‘It is. Stage shows are just pretend. I think you even told me that, once. It’s just exhibitionism. An excuse for people to go stupid. They have permission, under the circumstances, so they do it.’

He stood with a stillness that made me wonder whether he was breathing. Finally, he flicked the ashes from his cigarette, and the wind, which had grown a little stronger, carried them out to sea. ‘Mmm. Still. You’ve seen my work. You know that extraordinary things are possible. A life-long affliction gone in moments. Healing someone’s heartbreak with a couple shifts in perspective.’ He stubbed out the cigarette, a movement that was sudden and precise, like footage spliced together with frames missing. ‘Even as we’ve been talking, you’ve found yourself growing a little more relaxed, haven’t you?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘All that from conversation.’ He traced a finger along the railing, leaving behind a faint smudge. I watched it, unable to look away. ‘We come out to the balcony, say a few words, and you begin to find comfort in that. It’s amazing how little it takes to induce a change in someone’s state. A change that…along with the rise and fall of your breathing…can begin to deepen, now.’ His voice was low, and not unpleasant. But he stopped, here, and said nothing else. The silence between us stretched until it felt physical, like a third presence on the balcony.

‘It’s a relaxing Friday night,’ I said, hoping to break the silence. ‘Of course I’m relaxed and comfortable.’ I looked down at the water, the waves folding into themselves with gentle precision, though there was something off-centre about them.

He tilted his head towards me. ‘That’s right. And I’m sure that as you hear the sound of my voice, and of the waves below…you might begin to notice how you’ve turned your attention inward…and it can be so easy, to wonder whether something crazy might be possible. After all, you already know what it's like to change…and the more you wonder, consciously, the more you might realize-‘

I stopped him. ‘Okay, I see what you’re doing. Very funny.’ 

Though I did wonder. And I was beginning to feel strange - hearing his voice, I felt, in a way, heavier, like my bones had stretched, or thickened. My fingers were swollen against the metal railing, its coolness somehow both soothing and invasive against my flesh. And there was a shift in my insides, as though my organs had become tiny rocks.

‘It's growing cold,’ he said, and I found myself nodding, though I couldn't feel the temperature anymore, only the weight of my head as it moved. The railing left indentations on my palms when I pulled away, little crescent moons pressed into the flesh.

He opened the sliding door with a whisper of glass against track. I followed, watching my feet carry me forward with methodical steps that felt both mine and not mine. Inside, the apartment seemed larger somehow, the furniture arranged at unfamiliar angles. He gestured to the couch, and I sat, sinking into cushions that yielded beneath me like wet sand.

'Are you comfortable?’ he asked, and I wondered if my mouth would still form words if I tried to answer.

[tamesg]

Lunar New Year

The morning bell at Angel Grove High rings three minutes fast. It always has. I've worn grooves in my desk counting those minutes, matching them against heartbeats and footsteps and the time between disasters. My fingertips know every scratch in the wood, every mark of ordinary damage. Not like the marks on the walls outside - those tell different stories.

The clock's second hand catches fluorescent light like a knife edge, and something in my chest tightens. Twenty-seven hours until the Lunar New Year festival begins, and we haven't found all the weak points yet. Haven't mapped all the places where reality might slip.

"Hey, Bulk. Did you see them building the dragon?" Skull asks, his voice low. We're alone in the hallway - we're always alone when we talk like this. The smell of floor wax burns my nose, sharp and chemical. They always clean thoroughly after attacks, like they're trying to erase the memory of what the floors have seen. 

"They're using bamboo for the spine this year.”

I nod, feeling the familiar ache in my shoulders, the tension that never really leaves. We both know what bamboo means: hollow spaces, joins that can split and grow, segments that could become vertebrae if something decided to make them real. I've watched them working on it after school, their hands weaving paper scales over the framework. Each scale overlaps the next like armor waiting to harden, and my stomach churns with the memory of the last time paper decided to become something else.

The late bell rings. Neither of us moves. Through the classroom window, I can see Tommy checking his communicator. The motion is familiar, practiced - a twist of the wrist that shouldn't mean anything but means everything. Behind him, Kim is braiding her hair, fingers moving quick and sure. Ready to fight at a moment's notice, though she'd never admit that's why she does it. Jason stands near them, one hand resting on his backpack strap, body angled toward the door. Always ready. Always watching.

Sometimes I wonder if they know we watch too. If they understand that someone needs to be ready in a different way.

"Three exits," Skull mutters, more to himself than to me. "Four if you count the windows, but the drop's bad on this side." His fingers drum against his leg, counting exits, counting seconds, counting the space between now and whatever comes next.

I touch the wall beside us, feeling the paint beneath my fingers. Smooth in some places, rough in others. The school has been destroyed and rebuilt so many times that the layers of paint tell stories - if you know how to read them. This section is newer. Three months old. The old paint burned away when that fire-breathing thing came through. Sometimes late at night I can still smell the smoke, still feel the heat of it in my bones.

Down the hall, a janitor's cart sits unattended. The mop handle gleams wetly in the fluorescent light, and the sharp scent of disinfectant mingles with floor wax. I catalogue it automatically - another potential barrier, another tool for directing crowds. In Angel Grove, anything can become useful when the time comes. The lunch bell will ring in fifty-seven minutes. By then, we should be in position. Hundreds of students flooding the hallways at once - it's always when the crowds are biggest that things happen. Ready to create the kind of chaos that helps people find their way to safety.

Some people think we skip class because we're lazy. They don't understand that practice takes time. That being in the right place at the wrong time is an art. That sometimes the only way to help people run is to give them something smaller to run from first.

My chest tightens again as I watch Trini hurry past, carrying something that looks too much like a science project. The air feels heavy, thick with possibility. With waiting.

That's the worst part, really. Not the knowing, but the waiting. The space between normal and whatever comes next.

We've gotten good at filling that space.

---

The paper lanterns arrive in boxes. Plain cardboard, water stained at the corners, marked "FRAGILE" in red letters that blur in the morning mist. I watch the volunteers unpack them from our spot behind the dumpster, my shoulders already tight with remembered transformation. Next to me, Skull's breathing has that shallow quality it gets when he's counting something only he can see.

"They're using metal wires this year," he whispers. His breath fogs in the air, little clouds that dissipate too quickly. "For hanging them."

I remember the Halloween masquerade, how the real monsters moved through the crowd of fake ones. How we learned that sometimes the scariest thing isn't being able to tell the difference - it's realizing there might not be one. Every festival since then, I find myself watching the costumes, the masks, the decorations. Waiting to see which ones decide to stop pretending.

The volunteers string up the lanterns anyway, unaware. Their ladders scratch against the pavement, leaving little white marks like scars. I've mapped Angel Grove by its scars - the places where monsters have stepped, where battles have burned the earth, where transformations have left their signatures in concrete and steel. Sometimes I dream about them, these patterns written in the city's skin. Sometimes they almost make sense.

A box falls, spilling tissue paper across the ground. Red sheets flutter like wounded things before settling. One skids toward us, sliding across a drain cover. My hand jerks back instinctively - we both remember what came up through those drains last spring, how the metal covers flipped up like coins in an invisible slot. But it's just paper today, thin enough to see through, delicate as skin. I pick it up carefully, and for a moment, I imagine I can feel a pulse beneath its surface. My fingers remember other moments when seemingly harmless things became something else. The weight in my stomach grows heavier.

"Look," Skull says, his voice tight.

Across the street, they're assembling the stage. The wood is fresh, unweathered. Strong enough to hold dancers, musicians, performers. Strong enough to hold whatever else might decide to use it. I count the support beams, calculating load-bearing weights, potential stress points. Places where transformation might begin. My mouth goes dry with the taste of fear.

"Too many shadows under there," Skull says. He's right. The space beneath the stage is dark, intimate. Perfect for hiding. Perfect for changing. We both remember what came out of shadows at the masquerade, how darkness can become solid, can become hungry.

Tommy walks past the stage, Kimberly beside him. They pause, looking up at the half-strung lanterns. I watch Tommy's hand move toward his communicator - an unconscious gesture, like a man checking his pulse. Kimberly's fingers find the end of her braid, and I remember how she looked that night, when the monsters finally showed their true faces. How she disappeared into the chaos, and how moments later the Rangers appeared. Some patterns you can't unsee, once you start looking.

"We should check the parade route again," I say. My voice sounds strange in the morning quiet. "Count the drain covers."

Skull nods. His face has that distant look it gets when he's remembering something he'd rather forget. We both know what can hide in plain sight in Angel Grove. What can wear a mask until it decides not to. The memory makes my joints ache with the need to run.

Above us, the lanterns sway gently in a wind we can't feel. Their shadows dance across the pavement, making patterns that almost mean something. I try not to look for too long. Some patterns are better left unread, even if you can't stop seeing them. Even if they're the only thing keeping you alive.

---

The dragon arrives in pieces.

I watch from the school roof as they unload it - segments of bamboo and paper, wire and glue, all precisely labeled and organized. No crooked pieces. No hints of wrong growth. My fingertips remember other things that grew in Angel Grove, how even the simplest plants became suspect. How we learned to watch for certain patterns in leaves, in stems, in the way things reached toward the sun.

But this dragon shows no signs of wrong growth at all.

"They're not even arguing about how to put it together," Skull says. His fingers drum against the roof's edge, counting seconds or heartbeats or something else. I've stopped asking what he counts. Some patterns are personal. "Everyone just... knows what to do."

He's right. Below us, the assembly team works with mechanical precision. No dropped pieces, no confused instructions, no moment where the head ends up where the tail should be. Just smooth, efficient construction. The sound of their tools carries up to us, too regular, too rhythmic. Like a heartbeat that's forgotten how to skip.

I press my palm against the roof's surface. The tar paper is warm from the sun, sticky in places. It remembers summer, remembers melting. Remembers the time those vines burst through it, reaching for the sky with unnatural hunger. The repairs always leave traces, if you know where to feel for them.

"Tommy checked his communicator six times during third period," I say. "But it never made a sound."

Skull's counting fingers go still. "Kim's wearing her hair down."

We both know what that means. She always braids it before a fight, always prepares. But today her hair hangs loose, unprepared, like she's trying to convince herself nothing will happen. Like she's forgotten what happens when things grow too perfect in Angel Grove.

The dragon's head goes up first. Paper scales flutter as they lift it, catching sunlight like signals. Like warnings. I find myself counting the scales, trying to see the pattern in their arrangement. They've used gold paint on some of them, creating designs that almost make sense, almost tell a story. But there's no hidden meaning, no secret growth. Just paper and paint and precision.

"The crystal shop closed early," Skull says suddenly. "Packed everything up. Like they know."

Below us, Billy walks past the growing dragon, his scanner hidden badly behind a textbook. He stops. Looks up. Frowns.

"No readings," I say, though I'm too far to see the scanner's display. I don't need to see it. The way his shoulders tense tells me everything. Nothing growing wrong. Nothing growing at all.

The dragon is almost complete now. It looks perfect. That's what scares me most.

In all my years of watching things transform in Angel Grove, I've learned one truth: nothing perfect stays perfect. Nothing beautiful stays still. Everything grows, changes, becomes. Sometimes wrong, sometimes right, but always something.

Except today. Today, the dragon is just paper and bamboo and wire. Today, the patterns we've learned to read like breathing are silent.

Today, everything is wrong because nothing is wrong at all.

---

The lanterns come alive at sunset.

Not the way they should - not with tentacles or teeth or sudden malevolent awareness. They come alive with simple electricity, plain bulbs burning inside red paper. Their light falls across the crowd in gentle waves, turning faces rosy, peaceful. Normal. The normalcy settles on my skin like fever sweat.

A family stops beneath the nearest lantern. The father lifts his daughter for a better view. My hand twitches toward the cart we positioned earlier - good for blocking, for directing flow, for giving people something to run around. The mother takes a photo. I count the steps between them and the nearest exit. Twelve. Too many.

I feel Skull's fingers press against my arm, counting. One Mississippi, two Mississippi... He's timing the space between Tommy checking his communicator and Billy glancing at his hidden scanner. The gap keeps getting longer. Wrong. My throat tightens with each passing second.

A group of teenagers poses with the dragon. My eyes track the shadows behind them automatically, measuring depths, calculating hiding spaces. One girl drops her phone. I flinch toward her, ready to use the moment, to start the practiced chain of chaos that would clear this area. But she just laughs. Picks it up. The moment dissolves unused.

"Even Ernie's wearing a nice shirt," Skull whispers. His voice catches like he's trying not to laugh, or scream. "Ernie never wears nice shirts to big events. Not since the punch bowl incident."

He's right. Ernie stands behind his temporary booth, serving drinks in actual glasses instead of plastic cups. Each time one clinks against another, my muscles tense for action that isn't needed. The sound echoes wrong in my head - not like breaking, not like warning, just... glass against glass.

The dragon moves through the crowd, carried by dancers who smile and wave. Their movements are precise, practiced. No missteps, no moments where the bamboo spine might crack and spark and become something else. Just paper scales catching light, gold paint throwing back reflections that mean nothing at all. My fingers find the nearest pole, testing for vibrations that aren't there.

Zack leads another dance routine. The crowd parts for him, their movements liquid, natural. My body shifts automatically, widening the gap, creating a path that no one needs. Skull's breath catches - his cue to start screaming coming up, passing by, fading unused. All our preparations, all our practice, all our perfectly planned chaos... dissolving like smoke.

"Look," Skull says.

Kimberly stands by the stage, her loose hair falling around her shoulders like a surrender. She's watching the dragon dance with the kind of intensity I usually see just before things go wrong. But nothing goes wrong. The dragon stays paper. The lanterns stay lit. The night stays perfect.

Tommy appears beside her. Their hands don't move to their communicators. They don't tense for action. They just... watch. Something in my chest cracks at the sight.

A child runs past with a sparkler, trailing light. I map his trajectory, calculate impact points, plan diversions that won't be needed. My body knows these moves like breathing. The sparkler goes out. Nothing happens.

"Maybe," Skull starts, but doesn't finish. His fingers press deeper into my arm, counting nothing now. Just holding on.

Above us, the lanterns sway in a wind that feels too gentle, casting shadows that mean too little. The festival moves around us like water, like time, like something we can't control anymore. Jason stands near the dragon's tail, arms relaxed at his sides. No leader pose. No readiness. Just... peace.

We've learned to read Angel Grove like a book - every crack in the sidewalk, every strange shadow, every pattern of destruction and rebuilding. We know when to run, when to scream, when to make ourselves useful in our useless way.

But tonight the book is blank. The patterns are silent. Our bodies move through routines that find no purchase, like throwing punches at fog.

And somehow, that feels more like the end of the world than any monster ever has.

---

The morning after feels wrong in new ways.

I watch sunlight crawl across my bedroom ceiling, marking patterns that don't mean anything. My muscles ache from tension rather than running, from waiting for chaos that never came. Somewhere in the city, cleanup crews will be taking down lanterns that never transformed, dismantling a dragon that never lived.

Just thinking about it makes my throat tight.

School is worse. Skull meets me at the entrance, dark circles under his eyes matching mine. His fingers keep twitching, counting seconds or disasters or possibilities that didn't happen. The hallway stretches ahead of us, empty of threats, full of nothing at all.

"I checked the news," he says as we walk in. "Three times. Nothing."

I nod. I checked too, scanning articles about the festival's success. Words like "peaceful" and "perfect" jump out like accusations. They're calling it the best festival in Angel Grove's history. Like that's a good thing. Like that's not a warning all its own.

In class, I watch Tommy's communicator stay silent. Watch Kimberly's hair stay loose. Watch Billy's scanner stay hidden. Everything is normal, and nothing will ever be normal again.

During lunch, Skull and I sit at our usual table. The cafeteria feels too quiet, too still. A plastic fork falls from someone's tray, and we both jump. The sound echoes wrong, empty of meaning or warning. I find myself counting the steps to the nearest exit anyway. Fourteen. Too many, or not enough anymore.

"We should practice anyway," Skull says suddenly, his voice too loud in the quiet. "You know. Just in case."

I understand. We need the routine, need to remember what we're supposed to be. What Angel Grove is supposed to be. My body still knows the moves, even if the reasons have gone silent.

So we do our act. We cause our practiced chaos. We play our parts. A perfectly orchestrated moment of imperfection in a world that's become too perfect to trust.

But now we know. Know that worse than any monster, any transformation, any pattern of destruction and rebuilding, is the possibility that one day it might all just... stop. That one day, Angel Grove might forget how to change.

I touch the cafeteria wall, feeling for the familiar hum that isn't there. Skull's fingers tap against the table, counting nothing.

Above us, fluorescent lights flicker in patterns we can't read anymore.

[tamesg]

When I was 30

On the day I turned 30, my girlfriend bought me six large cupcakes instead of a birthday cake, sat me down with an even larger coffee, and insisted that we eat them right that second. This was the coolest and most thoughtful thing ever, but all I could think of was how afraid I was to eat them, because of my worsening orthorexia.

I started working at a gym two months later, which didn't help the orthorexia but did help with my money situation: I'd moved to Canada two years earlier with $50k in savings, which, I'd soon learned, doesn't go very far at all. The gym gave me a regular income but also a constant, throbbing headache, which I blamed on the lights but was really caused by selling memberships to fat idiots, and also dehydration/not ever eating. I quit six months later, sat around for two months, then went crawling back for another 18. That wasn't my proudest moment, but the silver lining is that working there gave me material for three seasons of a pretty good sitcom/parody Twitter account.

This was also the year I ended the best friendship I'd ever had. Not speaking with her every day is a shame, though the bigger shame is the number of albums and films that went with it: music I relied on to write now just makes me oddly and uncomfortably nostalgic, because so much just sounds like her. While this would definitely come in handy if I wanted to write an early 2000s-era teen drama, I can't bring myself to do it, because, as Netflix keeps showing us, that's just the worst kind of television.

Aside from this, nothing much else happened – 2015 really was just a year of limbo and odd transitions. I saw mountains for the first time (magical), met a new best friend (amazing), and picked up guitar again (clunky, then less clunky), but that's about it.