“Of course. Where do you think I got the idea?” Tommy retorted, shouldering the door open wider. Billy just sort of let him in, taken back by his former teammate’s ruthlessness.

“He almost disappeared!” Billy pleaded, but then shook his head, remembering the ice and shaving cream from the other night. “Alright, but I had nothing to do with this.”

“That’s fine. But either play along, or leave,” Tommy replied. Billy studied him for a minute, and shook his head.

“I’ll play along,” he replied as Tommy set the snake down on top of Zack’s clothes on the bed, then sat down on the bed beside Billy and just began to talk to him normally, just about his flight in from Washington, and what it was like having to be a ranger again, as the sound of the shower stopped. A few minutes later, a boxer clad former black ranger opened the door and stepped into the room.“No one was planning to use the Gems. At all. Ever. But once I found them, I couldn’t just leave them for someone like oh, say, Mesogog to find. So I figured if I needed them, I’d call out the old gang. White for me, Black for Zack, Red for Jason, Yellow for Trini, and Blue for Hayley, since Billy wasn’t on Earth. That’s why I was so prepared.”

“He found them right around the same time he got that job with Mercer,” Jason said. “He called us up, and we all started talking about it. We weren’t going to go back to active duty, but we’d be able to fight if we needed to. We all still have morphing abilities, ‘cept Kim and Billy, but we don’t have zords or bikes or anything. So he and Hayley worked it all out, with Trini helping and Billy occasionally giving advice over the Aqua-phone.”

“Anton funded the whole thing. He walked in on a choice conversation, and offered to fund all sorts of things; we were looking for a new project, after scrapping the Fossilador. He contributed some brilliant work, too. But I was never going to use the Gems,” Tommy repeated sourly. “I was going to store them. Preferably at Jason’s. Once I had all the kinks worked out, I was going to ship them off to someone else’s house and I was going to… the World Series.”“The second venom sting is always more volatile.” Billy said, considering the new information. A scorpion wasn’t a bee, but then neither monster was a real insect and both were supposedly metallic. He wondered if there was any way to determine if they had been constructed using the same technology. “I need to figure out what it is. It could be that her immune system is simply over reacting to a second sting, but I still need to make sure the reaction isn’t one that’s going to effect the rest of the team.”

“Guinea pig number one, reporting for duty.” Kim quipped, giving him a mock salute. He grinned at her in response and then both of them turned a more somber gaze back to Carri.