[Ellen Brand]

..........Time passed. Every day, Tommy and Lita had sessions where Lita tried to get Tommy to accept his dark side, without notable success. His problem, Lita informed Jason and Rocky after one unusually frustrating session, was that Tommy was too noble. He loathed the idea of hurting innocent people so much that he pulled too hard in the other direction. The struggle between his guilt and his natural human fallibility was pulling him apart.

..........After every session, Lita called Max Delany, an old college friend of hers and the expert in MPD that she had told Tommy about. As she had promised, she used no names, simply referring to Tommy as "the Ranger" or "the kid." Max and Lita discussed various methods of treatment, and she found his help in analyzing Tommy's psyche invaluable.

.........."I think stress is the only way to go, Lita," Max said one day. Lita smiled, listening to his husky baritone. Max's gruffly soothing voice was one of the reasons he did so well with patients. It doesn't hurt his relationships with women, either, Lita thought.

.........."Let me get this straight, Max. You think that a stressful situation, one that requires all of the kid's personality traits, will cause spontaneous integration?" Lita asked skeptically

.........."Got it in one, Leets. Knocks the socks off of fourteen years of therapy, doesn't it?"

.........."Oh, yes. There's just one problem. The kid's a Power Ranger. He's seen exploding planets, intelligent amphiboids, a race which evolved from insects, and a robotic dragon roughly the size of the Shinjuku district!"

.........."How big is that?" Max interrupted.

..........Lita's verbal stride never faltered. "Very big. Think Manhattan. As I was saying, he faces off with killer robots, a walking pile of bones, and a guy with no skin on a regular basis. What situation am I supposed to come up with that would be stressful for him?"

..........Lita could almost hear Max shrug on the other end of the line. "That's your department, isn't it?"

.........."Max, you are a cold, callous son-of-a-lawyer."

.........."That's because I care." His voice became hesitant. "Um, Lita, speaking of caring, are you sure that you'll be all right up there? Stuck in a cabin with a homicidal martial artist?"

.........."Number one, Max, the kid's not homicidal. That's his other personality, and the characteristic is spell-induced, not naturally occurring. Number two, if something does happen to go wrong, I have two other Rangers up here to protect me. Don't worry about me." Lita decided not to mention that Jason wasn't exactly a fully active Power Ranger at the moment. Max didn't need to worry any more than he was.

.........."If you say so. Take care, Lita."

.........."I will, Max. Thanks."



..........A few days later, Rocky was chopping wood when Lita came up the driveway with the days mail, muttering to herself as she sorted it. "Bill, bill, letter for Jason, magazine- 'Martial Arts World,' what a surprise, oh, Rocky, a postcard for you," she handed it to him, "and a letter for me from- Cousin Mako."

.........."Your cousin's a shark?" Rocky asked, looking down at the postcard. Just a reminder from his dentist about his wisdom teeth. He pocketed it.

.........."No, Rocky. Mako is her nickname. It's short for Makoto. Kino Makoto is my younger cousin. She still lives in Tokyo."

.........."You used to live in Japan?" Rocky inquired, fascinated.

.........."Yes." Lita sat on a nearby log, motioning for the young man to sit next to her. As Rocky obeyed, she continued. "You see, back in the early 1900's, my five times great-grandfather was a man named Kino Ichiro. Since Ichiro spoke English well, when he came to San Francisco, he was able to get a job waiting tables, rather than being forced into railroad labor like so many other Japanese immigrants. He built up enough money to be able to keep in touch with his family back home, and so the American and Japanese branches of the Kino family remained close.

.........."My parents met and married, and because they were both scientists, they received an offer for a long-term research grant in a Tokyo lab. They accepted, and moved to Japan. They lived quite close to the rest of my family. I was born in Japan to American parents. That gave me double citizenship. I learned to speak both English and Japanese, and grew up comfortable in both countries. My parents moved me back here when I was ten."

..........Rocky cast about for something else to ask her, not wanting the conversation to end. "Why did you become a psychiatrist?"

..........Lita shrugged. "I was always interested in helping people, so it was only natural for me to be a doctor. I've always been interested in the mind, how it works, so I decided to become a shrink. That's why I took this case. Yes, I want to help Tommy, but also, diagramming a superhero's mind appealed to me. Even if I could never publish, I could still discover all sorts of amazing things." Suddenly she laughed. "You know, it's strange that of all the psychiatrists that could have become mixed up in this adventure, Tommy's parents chose me."

.........."Why?"

.........."In Japan, there's a type of TV show called sentai. Sentai programs have different casts every year, different stories, different titles. What makes them similar is the format. They all tell about a team of young people who transform into spandex-clad, color-coded superheroes fighting an evil empire and battling monsters of the week in large robots. Sound familiar? I was gone by the time it came out, but my relatives would mail me tapes. I could never get enough of sentai as a teen-ager, and now I'm in the middle of a real live sentai adventure."

.........."So what's your cousin like?" Rocky asked.

.........."Boy crazy!" laughed Lita. "If she met you, she'd say that you looked like her sempai- her ex-boyfriend," she explained. "Of course, she'd say the same thing about Tommy, Jason, Adam, or any other reasonably attractive guy in the area."

..........Rocky smiled, but it was a small smile, not his usual wide grin. "Did he dump her?" At her nod, he continued. "She hasn't let him go yet, and so she sees him everywhere. I know how she feels. A few," he swallowed, "a few months ago, I lost my girlfriend, Jennifer, to King Mondo's goons. She had been one of his androids, sent to infiltrate the Power Rangers and destroy us one by one. When it came time to destroy me, however, she couldn't do it. Faking human emotions had an unusual effect on her programming. She fell in love with me. I fell in love right back. Mondo kidnapped her to punish us both.

.........."I guess I lost it. I didn't even morph, just went up to the cave as I was. I got her out and we were running out of the cave when Sprocket threw a bomb at us. Jen saw it coming and pushed me out of the cave. The explosion triggered an avalanche and buried her.

.........."I thought it was my fault. For a month I mourned her, seeing her in every face that passed by, beating myself up over what had happened. Then I met Katarina, my current girlfriend. She brought me back to life again. I know exactly how your cousin feels."

..........Lita looked at him in surprise. She could hardly believe that someone as light-hearted as Rocky could be hiding such deep pain. "Rocky, is it worth it? Being a Power Ranger, I mean. Is it worth the pain?"

.........."A voice cried "Look me in the stars/ and tell me truly, men of earth/ if all the soul and body scars/ were not too much to pay for birth," he quoted. "Robert Frost. Yes, it's worth the pain. What we do, the people we protect, they make everything we suffer worthwhile."

..........She shook her head, wondering at how much anguish these seemingly perfect teens held. Tommy's guilt, Rocky's grief, Jason's feeling of uselessness, Kat's worry over how she might have hurt Tommy's happiness, and Tanya's isolation, they were such adult pains for such young people. Briefly, she wondered what scars Adam, the enigmatic Green Ranger, might hide.

.........."We're all hurting, Dr. Kino," Rocky suddenly said, startling her. The growing darkness hid him from her sight. "All of us, all the time. We can't be everywhere at once, and the monsters know it. Not everyone survives a monster attack. We all have the names of the people we couldn't save burned into our minds. Tommy is not going to join them," he said fiercely.

.........."I promise, Rocky, I'll do the best I can." She took his hand and sat with him, watching the stars come out.



..........Whistling, Tommy walked into the kitchen to sort through the mail. Spying a letter from home, he opened it to find a note from his sister and a makeshift envelope of some old, yellowed parchment. He glanced at the note, which read, "Tommy. Found this in the attic, thought that you should see it. Didn't tell mom. You owe me an explanation when you get home, okay? Love, Chelsea."

..........Curious, Tommy opened the parchment. As he did so, something fell out of it, clunking onto the linoleum floor. He picked it up and stopped dead. The object in his hand was the coin of the Green Ranger, the one that had been in his clone's possession.

..........That can't be! he thought frantically to himself. I left it back in 1700's Angel Grove! Then he smacked his forehead mentally. Duh, Tommy, the thing didn't just disappear after the 1700's. It's probably been kicking around the houses of the Green Ranger's descendants for the past 200 years. But if that's true, how did it get into my parents' attic? Then he remembered. His parents had the habit of storing everything from every house they'd ever lived in. There were boxes in his attic that had been in the attic of his grandfather. But- if Grandpa Oliver had the Green coin, then that means.... Paling, Tommy sank into a chair. Just then, Lita and Jason walked into the kitchen.

.........."Kuso!" Lita cursed, seeing how white Tommy's face had become. Jason raised an eyebrow at her. "It's Japanese, and you don't need to know what it means."

Jason shrugged, bellowing, "Rocky, get in here! We have a situation!"

..........Rocky rushed into the kitchen with his customary grace, which is to say that he resembled a Great Dane on roller skates. "What's the matter?" he asked breathlessly.

..........Tommy smiled weakly. "I'm all right. I just had a bit of a shock." Quickly he related what he had found in the envelope and its significance. "My adopted family is descended from my clone. Guess I'm related to them by blood after all."

.........."Have you read the letter yet?" Jason asked.

.........."No, I guess I'd better do that now." Taking a deep breath, he unfolded the parchment and began to read. "Tommy. I guess you never thought that you'd hear from me again, huh? Something incredible has happened to make me write to you. In my time, Angel Grove is the only British settlement on the west coast. The Spanish are not happy with us, and relations are strained. They could wipe us out at any time, and they know that. They also know that it would cost them.

.........."Recently the governor of the Pueblo de Los Angeles, to the south, came up to talk to our headmen. I had the fortune to meet and fall in love with his beautiful niece. We're going to be married in a few weeks. Her name is Rosalita Hernandez.

.........."The name rang a bell. Remember that genealogy project we did in eight grade? Probably not; your memory stinks. Giving me a photographic memory was the only improvement Rita made on the original. Anyway, I remembered that our three times great-grandmother was named Rosalita Oliver. Her husband was a gringo who moved down from the north.

.........."Rosalita and I are moving to Los Angeles, and I realized that this meant that we were going to become the ancestors of the family which adopted you. I knew that someday this coin would make its way back to you. I can't shake the feeling that you're going to need it, no matter how much you hate the sight of it. Take care, man. I wish you and- and Kimberly all the best." Tommy's voice caught on the last line. "Signed, Thomas Oliver, formerly the Green Ranger."

..........The four of them sat in silence for a moment, pondering the appearance of the letter. Finally, Jason spoke.

.........."Well, that answers a few questions, like why Chelsea and Teddy resemble Tommy so much. I wonder why it turned up now, of all times?"

..........Tommy smiled wearily. "Jason, if there's one thing I've learned, it's never look a gift Power Coin in the mouth."