Chapter Text
The Morphin Grid was a dimension full of light and colour, home to infinite possibilities and life beyond the confines of death… something that connected not only all life but all matter… something beyond scientific or mystical definitions. It was the one thing thought to exist forever…
And yet, as Zayto wandered through the Grid, he could clearly see the Morphin Grid was on the verge of death, and with it, all of existence, across time, space and reality.
He had been a Morphin Master for a few decades now, watching over teams of rangers and their allies like a guardian angel, not dissimilar to how Master Green had once looked after his own team, and yet in all his time understanding the Grid, he had not seen anything like this.
The Grid was more infinite than anyone ever thought possible, and the multiverse even more so.
The Grid appeared to those who visited it in many forms.
To a robot like Alpha-6, it appeared as a hallway stretching to infinity, its walls lined with technology and lightning bolts flickering from one end to the other.
To a human like Kimberly Hart from the Coinless Universe, it appeared ethereal but yet something the human mind could comprehend… floating islands, mountains and forests, filled with strange creatures and spirits.
To most energy beings like the other Masters, it appeared as outer space with millions of tiny stars all around them, each representing a space-time coordinate with an active grid link.
The universe he had hailed from, the neighbouring ones of the RPM and the Dino Charge rangers and a few others were the ones his fellow Masters had watched over since the dawn of time, and encouraged him to do the same, instead of diverting his attention to the countless other universes that either spawned from timelines branching out from these ‘core’ worlds or were completely segregated from these worlds, with little to no similarities to these worlds. In their opinion, these isolated universes were best left under the care of other clans of Morphin Masters, their emissaries, or even on their own. The Masters were vehement that nothing that happened in these peripheral universes could become significant enough to draw their attention, and crises would resolve on their own.
They were so wrong, and now the entire Grid was in grave danger.
Zayto had noticed some irregularities… stagnations in the timeline, where ideally the grid should have reacted. No new ranger teams rising in the year following the Cosmic Fury rangers’ victory and Lord Zedd’s banishment despite the rise of new threats and resurgence of old ones in the wake of the galaxy wide chaos caused by Zedd’s rise to power and subsequent fall, but Master Green had pointed out it was nothing that out of the ordinary, and older rangers were taking care of it.
2025 saw the rise of the B-Squad Power Rangers, but with their prior appearances in the timestream, it was more or less a fixed point just like Time Force rangers in the 31st century.
However, that was the last new ranger team for many years, and new threats were being taken care of by the SPD rangers (while most of the team remained constant, new rangers came in, like Lina Song and JJ Oliver) and veteran ranger teams working in conjunction with SPD, SPA and other peace-keeping organizations across the galaxy.
Zayto looked at other universes- no new ranger teams in either the RPM or the Dino Charge universes despite there being a necessity for it. The Dino Charge rangers, who were rendered effectively immortal by their energems stayed their world’s protectors for thousands of years, while the RPM morphers were passed down to the next generation.
It was as if the Grid had become stagnant and instead of putting effort to create new teams and powers specifically targeted to counter them, it was recycling old resources to keep the balance. It was as if the Grid was tired, or was funneling its energies elsewhere… Or maybe it was an effort to keep the timelines from further branching due to the debut of new teams.
Whatever it was, while things were stable, they were far from normal. Everything was repetitive…
Zayto had tried to listen to the Masters, and kept himself busy by watching over his old friends and later their descendants. While becoming a Morphin Master came with tremendous powers and immortality, it had a terrible cost… He could never reunite with his old friends even after their deaths. He could never commune with his mother or father, or the ones he had lost.
The spirit world was part of the Grid, but situated at an even deeper level than his powers could access. He could open a portal to limbo, perhaps, recruit or even resurrect spirits to his cause before he fully moved on to the afterlife, like how the Masters and later Zordon had recruited him, but he could never know what happened to his friends and family after their death. He would have to be content with watching over them while they still lived.
He did not miss them technically, because he could see them at all points of their life and perhaps, he knew them better than they knew themselves at this point, but he missed talking to them, being with them.
He kept himself busy with the descendants of the ranger teams, but the lingering thought of something not quite fitting right stayed with him. He watched the transformation of SPD to Time Force, and later, the development of Hyperforce, and that was when things got to the point he could not ignore… The Hyperforce rangers unknowingly got lost in a new timeline, a branch timeline formed due to the actions of the ‘Alliance’ in the past.
It was due to the Master Blue’s intervention by creating warp shields over the timeline that reality was not rewritten, like how it was for the world of the Dino Charge Rangers, and leading to the birth of a divergent reality, one where the actions of the Hyperforce rangers and their enemies, a corrupt faction of Time Force, created many disruptions to the point where the new timeline was drastically different from the one it originated from.
However, it was a universe that the Masters considered not worthy of their attention, discarding it as a by-product or a necessary
Yet the situation reminded Zayto of when 65 million years ago, back when Aiyon and several others had cautioned against the use of the Sporix Generator, and how ignoring those warnings led to untold devastation.
He kept tabs on the divergent universe.
The changes started small and almost indistinguishable at first… The disappearance of Scorpina in the year 1994 because of her being recruited by the Alliance instead of being banished to the Talos Dimension by Rita.
The Hyperforce rangers’ actions were mostly undercover except the time they failed to prevent the Alliance from capturing Zordon, even with support from allies they had gathered over their adventures, resulting in a massive temporal distortion that irrevocably changed the history of the universe, as well as wiped out the Time Force native to this timeline, leaving the timestream malleable to further manipulation.
Dark Specter had fallen, destroyed at the hands of Thrax, one of the leaders of the ‘Alliance’, and his powers later funneled into Rita and Zedd, after Thrax’s own destruction at the hands of the rangers… In this new timeline, Lord Zedd and Rita Repulsa used their new found powers to claim leadership over the forces of evil and conquered the universe, reigning over it for thousands of years.
Zayto shuddered at the thought of evil winning the war, of a world where his duplicate remained in cryogenic hibernation forever, and never met his second team nor reunited with Aiyon.
After multiple efforts, the Hyperforce rangers gave up, and scattered across time and space, resigned to the dark fate their universe had been deigned and trying to help loosen the grip the forces of evil had in their own little way, with one of them even going undercover into the Alliance. Zayto was concerned, but no matter how much he wanted to intervene, he couldn’t. The only way to restore the timeline to what it should have been was to rescue Zordon and place him back in his correct position in the continuum so at the right moment, Andros can shatter his tube and the Z wave can diffuse the forces of evil across the universe, and somehow, Zordon’s location was a mystery even to him, no matter how much he scried into this universe’s timeline. Something was cloaking Zordon, something powerful enough to counter the abilities of a Morphin Master, but if this universe was insignificant to the greater continuum like the other Masters thought, why was this Alliance or their mysterious benefactor putting so much effort into distorting this timeline?
He could sense faint traces of energy, unfamiliar to anything he had witnessed in the core worlds. Something very alien…
Zayto knew this was worth investigating, no matter what the other Masters thought, and the only way to do that was to survey the Grid and the multiverse as a whole, instead of focusing on the so called “core” worlds…
Zayto let his senses outward, and beamed higher into the ‘skies’ of the dimension, till he got a ‘bird’s eye’ view… And what he saw was the last hammer on the nail… irrefutable proof that there was a problem the Masters have been ignoring for a long time.
The Grid, as he was used to seeing, was like the insides of a prism, with light bouncing off one wall and hitting the other, till every corner was illuminated, bereft of any shadows…
Except here, the prism was cracked, and the light had dimmed. In some parts, entire sectors of the multiverse, comprising of countless worlds, the prism was shattered totally and it looked like coloured glass shards floating in a sea of black ichor.
What was happening?
And why hadn’t he sensed it before?
The Grid was reeking of decay.
Death was a natural part of the universe, a cycle of life and balance, but this was something different.
The Grid was not dying. It could never die, but something akin to a viral infection, crippling it from the inside out.
The Grid was ill… and somehow the Masters had not detected it.
Even the Emissaries, and other clans of Masters had not reported the disturbance or asked for their aid, like they were supposed to.
This was far more serious than he had thought, and something needed to be done, before this affliction reached the ‘core’ worlds… the reality of his friends.
He needed to consult with the other Masters.
Except before he could return to his own Grid sector, tendrils of darkness shot out from everywhere, darting towards him.
He gripped his staff, summoning raw energy from the Grid, except the energies were tainted with the same darkness that attacked him.
He promptly let go of the staff, and flew past the ebony ribbons. For the first time since his ascension to a Master, he felt adrenaline coursing through his veins as his old knight training and ranger intuition took over. He hadn’t been physically active in ages, and yet, he swerved every attack, looking for a way out.
One thing was clear.
He could not lead this darkness back to the core worlds, and neither could he allow himself to fall prey to whatever this foul energy was.
He was on his own.
He needed to hide, figure out some way to warn the other masters…
He spotted a shattered glass, one not yet dissolved by the obsidian ooze, representing a world that he might be safe in for a while.
He dived right at it, disappearing into it before he could be claimed by the darkness.
Zayto felt the disconnect from the Grid immensely, as he was thrust into a mortal world once more, and he felt a strong pain… He was so used to the energies of the grid, that being away from it was almost debilitating… and he realized one thing. Maybe the reason this world was safe, was because it was not as strongly connected to the Grid.
Maybe this was why there had been a marked decrease in the number of new ranger teams in his home reality. The local Grid was avoiding drawing on more power, and risk contamination. The Grid as a whole was using all its powers to combat the infection.
Once again, he wondered how the Masters could have missed something like it, but before he could ponder on it, he winced in pain, as he felt his powers receding, and his form become physical… flesh, bone and blood, instead of cosmic energy constructs in reaction to it.
He still had power, but without his staff, it would be difficult to channel the Grid or commune with the other Masters, but he would figure it out somehow.
He fought off the pain and the chills as he tumbled through the timestream and dimension turbulence of the world he had, before crashing into the solid ground.
It took a moment to reorient himself.
He opened his eyes. It had been ages since he actually saw with his actual eyes instead of just absorbing information and receiving visions.
It was beautiful.
The slight wind over his face.
The light.
Not as dark as the void in the grid, or as bright as each tiny star, but just right enough.
He saw the blue skies, the white tufts of clouds, and trees… so many trees.
He heard the chirping of birds, and the sound of other animals.
It was familiar…
He could sense he was on Earth, even if it was not his Earth.
Before he could process all that had happened, multiple bolts of light crashed to the ground all around him, fading away to reveal a platoon of armoured warriors pointing their blasters at him.
Great, he had just appeared on this planet, and he was already surrounded by possibly hostile forces. He still had powers, but in his weakened state, he was unsure if he could take them on in a fight.
Zayto squinted at the armour worn by these people, which was unlike any defensive wear he had seen anyone from Earth wearing before, but something he was very familiar with, all the same.
Before he could ask anything, the leader of the squadron that had teleported all around him, spoke up in a harsh voice.
"Surrender in the name of the Neo Rafkon Empire!"