Chapter 1: Before the Fall
The sun beat down on the Angel Grove University quad, turning the concrete pathways into griddles and the air into a haze of cut grass and sunscreen. Students crisscrossed between brick buildings, a river of backpacks, coffee cups, and murmured conversations about unfinished readings and last night’s parties. The world felt safe, annoyingly so, its biggest drama contained to a shouted argument outside the humanities building about a borrowed textbook.
Jason Lee Scott moved through it all like a current against the tide. While others shuffled sleepily, his footsteps on the track field were precise, measured, a steady thump-thump-thump that matched his breathing. His shirt was already dark with sweat. Five miles before his first class. It wasn’t just training; it was maintenance. A way to sand down the edges of a constant, low-grade tension that lived in his shoulders.
His phone buzzed on the bleachers. A text from his dad: Don’t forget the loan payment office closes at 4. Followed by: Mom’s shift ends at 7. There’s leftovers.
Jason didn’t stop running. He just let out a sharp breath that wasn’t quite a sigh. Dependable. That was the word. The dependable son, the dependable student, the guy who spotted you in the gym without being asked. It was a pride thing, sure, but it was also a cage. He took the final corner, pushing his pace until his lungs burned, trying to outrun the feeling that he was perpetually three steps behind where he needed to be.
Across campus, Kimberly Hart navigated the crowded walkway outside the arts building with the effortless, frustrating grace of someone who knew she was being watched. Her ponytail was a perfect slash of dark hair, her leggings bright against the monotone brick. A guy calling her name—"Kim! Hey, Kim!"—got a flawless, fluttering wave and a smile that didn’t reach her eyes before she ducked into the building.
Inside the bathroom, the smile vanished. She leaned on the sink, staring at her reflection. Another text from her mother: Did you send the photos from the exhibition? Aunt Linda wants to see. Another performance, another audience. She splashed water on her face, the cold a brief shock. For a few hours, in the gymnastics studio, it was just her and the beam, the vault, the unforgiving mat. No photos, no expectations. Just the tangible goal of a stuck landing. She pushed off the sink, reassembling the bright, approachable expression before heading to class.
Billy Cranston was late. His backpack, a overstuffed canvas monster, threatened to spill a cascade of graph paper, prototyping tools, and a half-soldered circuit board as he jogged past the student center. “Sorry! Sorry!” he muttered to a girl he nearly clipped, not stopping.
His mind was a browser with fifty tabs open: the calculus problem set due at noon, the erratic data logs from his homemade spectrometer, the nagging suspicion that the physics professor’s theory on resonant energy decay was, respectfully, full of holes. He didn’t hear the catcall from a frat house balcony. He was already mentally in the lab, where things made sense, where the variables could be controlled.
He rushed past a guy doing slow, deliberate stretches on a patch of grass—Jason, though Billy didn’t know his name—and their worlds didn’t so much as ripple as they passed.
In a cool, dark lecture hall, Trini Kwan sat in her usual spot: third row, far left. The developmental psychology professor droned on about attachment theory. Trini’s notebook was open, but she wasn’t writing down the lecture. She was watching the girl two rows ahead nervously twist her hair, the guy in the front checking his phone under the desk, the professor’s slight limp she’d only just noticed today.
She categorized their tells, their micro-expressions. It was easier than focusing on the hollow feeling in her own chest, the one that arrived every time her parents asked “Have you made any friends yet?” with that worried-proud look. Friends required letting people in. Letting people in required explaining why her family moved every two years, why she hated small talk, why she sometimes just needed to disappear into the hills outside town and scream until her throat was raw. So she observed, a satellite of a person, emotionally unreachable and fiercely, silently, okay with it.
The music from the student center was a physical thing, a thumping bassline you felt in your teeth. Zack Taylor emerged from the building, laughing and swapping a complicated handshake with a guy wearing a campus radio shirt. “You killed it, man!” the guy said.
“Always do!” Zack shot back, his smile wide and easy. He bounced on the balls of his feet, energy looking for an outlet. The performance was over, the adrenaline still there. He made his way toward the dining hall, calling out greetings, cracking jokes, a one-man pep rally.
Nobody saw the moment his smile faded as he checked his own phone. A missed call from home. Again. He shoved the phone deep into his pocket and turned the volume of his own persona back up, joking with the cashier about the mystery meat. He had to be light, because if he stopped moving, if he let himself be still, the weight of everything they couldn’t afford back home would pin him to the ground.
Their paths crossed, briefly, insignificantly. Jason, leaving the gym, held the door for Kimberly, who gave him a distracted “thanks” without really seeing him. Billy, spilling papers, was nearly bowled over by Zack’s dancing exit from the music building. “My bad, scientist dude!” Zack grinned, helping gather the pages. Trini, cutting through the quiet of the library, watched the brief, clumsy interaction from a distance, a silent critic of its choreography.
They were strangers, orbiting the same small planet of Angel Grove University, each feeling utterly, uniquely alone in a crowd of thousands.
As the afternoon bled into evening, the campus began to slow. Jason finished his weight session, his body humming with a familiar fatigue. Kimberly finally changed out of her leotard, the bruises on her hips a private badge of honor. Billy’s spectrometer whirred to life, spitting out jagged, beautiful lines of data. Trini packed her single notebook into her bag, ready for the solitude of her commute. Zack turned his music up loud in his headphones, drowning out the quiet.
The sunset over Angel Grove was not beautiful. It was lurid. The sky bled a sickly orange-purple, the clouds stretched thin like scars. The air, which should have been cooling, felt thick and heavy, pressing down on the skin. It was the kind of sunset that made you pause, just for a second, and think, Huh. That’s weird.
Far above, beyond the atmosphere, beyond the moon, in the cold, silent dark, something shifted. A frequency, long dormant, scratched against the fabric of space. A single, massive eye, etched with ancient hatred, slid open. It pulsed with a malign, green light.
Down in Angel Grove, Jason stopped on his walk to the bus stop, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. He looked up at the ugly sky, a frown deepening on his face.
“You see that?” a girl next to him asked, pointing. It was Kimberly, her gymnast’s bag slung over one shoulder.
“Yeah,” Jason said, his voice low. “Looks wrong.”
“Pretty, though. In a scary movie kind of way,” she offered, trying to lighten the strange weight in the air.
Before he could answer, a deep, resonant thrum vibrated through the pavement, a sound felt more than heard. It rose from beneath the city, a single, groaning note that rattled windows in their frames.
All across campus, people stopped. Billy looked up from his phone. Trini turned from her car door. Zack pulled his headphones down.
The sound faded as suddenly as it came. An uneasy silence followed, broken by nervous laughter and muttered questions.
“What the hell was that?” Jason said, more to himself than to Kimberly.
She shook her head, her earlier ease gone. “No idea. Sounded like it came from… under us.”
They stood there for a moment longer, two strangers sharing a moment of primal, unsettling dread under a bleeding sky. Then, the moment broke. A friend called Kimberly’s name. Jason’s bus rumbled into view.
They went their separate ways, the strange incident already being filed away by most as a quirk, a glitch, a shared moment of weirdness in an otherwise ordinary day.
But in the soil of the Angel Grove hills, in the bedrock below the city, something awakened. And high above, the hateful eye narrowed, finding a pale blue dot in the endless black. It began to plot its descent.
It began to plot its descent. The ground-shaking thrum faded into the humid evening, leaving behind a silence that felt heavier than before. People shrugged, laughed nervously, and went back to their lives. Jason caught his bus, the rumble of the engine masking the last of his unease. He stared out the window at the passing streets of Angel Grove, the normalcy of it all—the pizza parlors, the lit storefronts, the kids on bikes—feeling suddenly fragile, like a soap bubble ready to pop.
He got off two stops early, needing to walk, to move the residual energy buzzing in his limbs. His neighborhood was quiet, the only sound the distant bark of a dog. He was halfway down his block, keys already in hand, when the sky tore open.
It wasn’t a sound. It was a rupture. A jagged seam of electric-green light sliced through the purple-orange dusk directly over downtown. The air pressure dropped violently, making his ears pop. Then came the scream—not a human scream, but a shriek of rending reality. From the tear, dark shapes poured out, raining down onto the city like vile hail.
They hit the ground with heavy, wet thuds. Dozens, then hundreds. They looked like unfinished sculptures, figures of coarse, gray clay molded into the rough shape of men, but featureless save for glowing yellow eyes. They moved with a terrifying, unified purpose, shambling at first, then with unsettling speed.
Jason stood frozen on the sidewalk, his brain refusing to process the tableau of impossible destruction unfolding two miles away. A Putty Patroller—though he didn’t know its name—backhanded a parked car, sending it flipping onto its roof with a deafening shriek of metal. Another tore a streetlight from its concrete base, swinging it like a club through a storefront window. The glass exploded outward in a glittering cascade.
Screams. Real, human screams now, high and sharp on the wind.
Then, the first person died.
It was a man in a suit, running. A Putty lunged, its fist—a blunt, massive hammer of clay—impacted his chest with a sickening crunch. The man didn't even cry out; he just folded, a ragdoll thrown against a brick wall. Jason’s stomach lurched.
This was no movie. This was real. People were being slaughtered.
He started running. Not toward it. Away. The primal, animal part of his brain, the part all his discipline couldn’t silence, screamed at him to survive. He sprinted down an alley, his heart hammering against his ribs, the sounds of carnage and collapsing buildings chasing him. He vaulted a fence, rolled onto a sidestreet, and scrambled to his feet.
He had to get home. His parents, his neighbors.
A woman ran past him, her face a mask of blood. A child wailed from a crushed station wagon. The world had become a nightmare in under a minute.
He cut through a small playground. That’s where he saw her.
A little girl, maybe six, with curly hair matted with dust. She was standing perfectly still in the middle of the sandbox, clutching a tattered yellow stuffed rabbit. Around her, the playground was a wreck. The swing set was bent double. And ten feet from her, two figures lay motionless, half-covered by the splintered remains of a picnic table. A man and a woman. The girl just stared at them.
Two Putty Patrollers clomped through the shredded chain-link fence, their yellow eyes scanning. They zeroed in on the motionless adults, then on the small, standing child. They shambled toward her.
Jason didn’t think.
He was across the playground in five strides. He didn’t shout. He put his body between the girl and the monsters. The first Putty reached for her. Jason pivoted, his training taking over where his fear left off. A spinning hook kick connected with the thing’s head. It felt like kicking a brick wall, but the force snapped its head to the side. It stumbled.
The second swung. Jason ducked, the fist whistling over his head. He drove an elbow into its torso—again, that sickening solidity—and followed with a knee. It grunted, a dry, rocky sound.
“Hey!” he yelled at the girl, not taking his eyes off the Putties who were now regrouping, focusing on him. “You have to run! Now!”
She didn’t move. She just looked at him, her eyes wide and empty, still clutching her rabbit.
The Putties charged together. Jason met them, a flurry of blocks and strikes. He broke a piece of the monkey bars off and swung it like a bat. It shattered against a Putty’s shoulder, barely slowing it. A fist caught him in the ribs. The air exploded from his lungs, pain radiating like fire. He staggered back, gasping.
“Please!” he coughed, blood on his lip, looking at the girl. “You have to go! Run that way! Please!”
Something in his voice—the raw desperation, the pain—pierced her shock. She flinched, looked from her parents to him, and then she ran, her little legs pumping, disappearing around the corner of a burning house.
Jason felt a wave of cold relief, instantly drowned by icy terror. He was alone now. And the Putties were on him.
He fought. He used everything he knew. A palm strike to the chin. A low sweep to the legs. A piece of rebar as a makeshift spear. It was useless. For every one he knocked down, two more seemed to emerge from the smoke. They were endless. A blow to his back sent him sprawling. Another kick to his stomach made him vomit. He rolled, barely avoiding a stomp that cratered the asphalt where his head had been.
He got up. Again. His left arm hung limp, probably broken. He could barely see out of his right eye, blood dripping into it.
One of them grabbed him by the throat, lifting him off the ground. He choked, clawing at the stone fingers. The glowing yellow eyes of the Putty stared blankly at him. Another raised its fist, ready to crush his skull.
This is it, he thought, the noise of the dying city fading into a dull roar. I couldn’t protect anyone.
The killing blow never landed.
A column of pure white light enveloped him. The grip on his throat vanished. The sounds, the smoke, the pain—it all disappeared, sucked away into a silent, rushing void. He felt weightless, tumbling through a tunnel of spiraling energy, colors and shapes he couldn't comprehend flashing past.
Then, solid ground. Cool, smooth, and hard.
He collapsed onto his hands and knees, coughing, retching. The air here was different—sterile, filtered, with a faint metallic tang. The silence was absolute, a profound emptiness that rang in his assaulted ears.
He looked up, blinking blood out of his eye.
He was in some kind of… chamber. Vast. Impossibly vast. The walls curved upward into a shadowy dome hundreds of feet above. In the center of the chamber, set into the floor, was a massive, circular platform with five colored stations—red, blue, yellow, black, pink. And ahead, at the far end, a wall of illuminated, honeycombed technology pulsed with soft light. A command center. A base.
But a base for what?
Footsteps. Fast, clattering, metallic footsteps.
Jason forced himself up, every muscle screaming, and fell into a fighting stance with his one good arm. From behind a console, a creature emerged. It was small, maybe four feet tall, with a silvery domed head, a blue faceplate, and a frantic, shuffling gait. It had two glowing optical sensors for eyes and was wringing its three-fingered hands.
“Oh, oh no! You’re injured! The teleportation was too rough, I knew the coordinates were unstable with the planetary interference, but Zordon said we had no time! Ay-yi-yi!”
Jason stared, his brain short-circuiting. “What… what are you? Where is this?”
“I am Alpha 5! And you are safe now! Well, safer than you were, which was about to be very not safe! We brought you here!”
“We?” Jason growled, still poised, his eyes darting around the cavernous space for other threats. “Who’s ‘we’? Why? What the hell is going on back there? Those things—”
“Are Putty Patrollers! The foot soldiers of the Empress Rita Repulsa!” Alpha said, shuffling closer but stopping when Jason flinched. “She has begun her invasion of your planet! Your city is just the beginning!”
Jason’s mind raced, a frantic tumble of questions fighting through the pain and adrenaline. “Okay. Okay, slow down.” He took a painful breath. “Question one: Where is ‘here’?”
“The Command Center! It is located in a dormant volcano, geographically remote from Angel Grove to ensure security!”
“Question two: Why me? Why did you… teleport me?”
“Because you were chosen!”
“Chosen by who?”
“By him!” Alpha gestured wildly with a spindly arm toward the bank of glowing technology.
Jason followed the gesture. There was nothing but lights and consoles. “There’s no one there.”
“Question three,” Jason pressed, his voice hardening. “If you’re against these Putty things, why aren’t you sending help back there? Right now? People are dying!”
“We cannot intervene directly! Our power must be channeled! That is why you were brought!”
“Channeled how? To do what?” Jason demanded, frustration and fury cutting through his shock. “And who is ‘we,’ Alpha? Who the hell is in charge?”
The air in front of the great honeycombed wall shimmered. The light coalesced, stretched, and formed into the colossal, translucent visage of a man’s face, stern and ancient, framed within a glowing tube of energy.
A deep, resonant voice filled the chamber, vibrating in Jason’s bones.
“I am Zordon.”
Jason stumbled back, his defensive stance forgotten. He was looking up at a giant floating head. A giant floating head had just spoken his name.
“Your questions are valid, Jason Lee Scott,” the face—Zordon—continued, his tone carrying an immense, weary gravity. “The ‘how’ and the ‘why’ you seek are before you. The violence upon your world is my burden to bear. An enemy from my past has come to claim your future. You were chosen not at random, but because your spirit, your will to protect even in the face of absolute despair, shone like a beacon.”
“I didn’t protect anyone,” Jason spat, the image of the little girl’s parents flashing before his eyes. “They’re all dead. I ran.”
“You gave a child life,” Zordon intoned. “And you stood your ground when all was lost. That is the essence of what is required now. The power to fight back exists. But it requires a vessel. A human heart. A human will.”
Jason shook his head, the movement sending spikes of pain through his skull. “This is insane. You’re talking about… what? Giving me power? To fight an army?”
“Not just you,” Zordon said. “Four others, with hearts akin to yours, have also been brought from the chaos. They are frightened and confused, as you are. The choice will be offered to all.”
“Others?” Jason looked around the empty platform.
“The power is immense. The cost is higher. You will be targeted. Your lives will never be your own. The battle will be relentless.” Zordon’s gaze was unwavering. “You asked how you can help. The first step is to see. To understand the true enemy. To witness her vision for your world.”
Alpha 5 shuffled over to a console and tapped a sequence. In the center of the platform, a golden globe of energy crackled to life, expanding into a sphere of shimmering light.
“Look into the Viewing Globe, Jason,” Zordon commanded softly.
Hesitantly, Jason approached the swirling light. Images resolved within it. He saw the girl with the yellow rabbit, now sobbing in the arms of a firefighter. He saw the Putties, methodically dismantling the city, spreading out from downtown toward the suburbs. Toward his neighborhood.
Then the image shifted, pulling back, rising high above the planet until Earth was a blue marble in the black. And there, hovering in the dark, was a monstrous, skull-like palace surrounded by floating asteroids. On a throne of crystal and bone sat a woman in green, her face contorted in cruel delight, a staff glowing with wicked power in her hand. Behind her, leering into the void, were creatures of nightmare—a man with a fin for a head, a shrieking bard, a hulking beast in armor.
Rita Repulsa.
She pointed her staff, and a new bolt of green energy lanced down, striking a mountain range on the other side of the globe. The Viewing Globe showed the scale of it, the sheer planetary scope of the invasion. Angel Grove was just the first scratch.
Jason watched, his breath caught in his throat. The fear was still there, a cold knot in his gut. But beneath it, something else was burning away the shock and the pain. A hot, clean anger. A refusal.
He turned from the globe and looked up at the immense, solemn face of Zordon.
“What do I have to do?”