Chapter Text
Lord Zedd
The closer he got to Earth, the more frustrated Zedd became with everything he was picking up from his creations. He had been prepared to acknowledge that any team that could defeat Rita when she still had the green coin would be a problem, but he had harboured hopes that their local Green Ranger would be a problem, even before he had to unleash his own wave of monsters to try and keep them busy.
He was aware that the monsters probably weren't his best work, considering that he had been out of practice after millennia of isolation, but he would have expected to have news of at least one casualty by now. The concept that such a relatively isolated planet could mount such an effective resistance to his own plans… frankly, it was at the very least insulting to his own efforts.
If he was going to mount an effective counter-attack on Earth, he needed a new insight into the planet… and fortunately, at least one of his creations may offer just that opportunity if he could make contact.
It might be a risk, but when he was faced with at least a couple of further weeks of travel before he reached his destination, taking additional action would at least give him something more to do than wait and stew in his own frustrations until he could get to that benighted planet.
They may be surprisingly effective Rangers so far, but his former patsy had given him some interesting information about that world. In a civilisation that seemed determined to keep itself down, he could probably find some way to use that situation in his favour…
Rue
The hardest part of being associated with the Rangers these days was that she couldn't join them in the field.
It wasn't as though Rue liked the idea of fighting- she'd basically forced herself to focus on the other opportunities of being chosen as a Tribute to stop herself thinking about the idea that she'd be expected to fight to kill someone if she wanted to get home- and she appreciated that Zordon had reasons for not making her the Green Ranger, but it still felt so frustrating to just be left behind on the ship and watch them fight. She didn't even want to bring it up to anyone else as it just made her feel selfish, when she'd found great friends and been given a chance to be part of something that nobody else in Panem could ever know, but watching from the outside as the rest of her friends worked to defend and reshape their world…
She would do what she could to help the others, but she wanted to feel like she was helping the others do something that would matter. Right now, even if she appreciated that Alpha hadn't meant it as a bad thing, she still felt like the tagalong kid who'd just wandered into the ship because she was following Katniss.
She just wanted some kind of chance to feel like she could actually do something to help, instead of feeling like she was just… here…
Caesar Flickerman
Over his years as the host of the Hunger Games and other related news broadcasts, Caesar had been quick to learn that there would always be certain things he was expected to keep from the public. These might depend on whether the government simply didn't want to share the full details with people, or simply hadn't decided how they wanted to present it to the Districts, but ultimately Caesar knew his role and was happy to do his part in keeping the peace.
The problem with this current situation was that nobody seemed to know what the problem actually was. He could appreciate that the Power Rangers had their own strange agenda that seemed to be elusive to everyone else, but he was used to knowing things that even the general public didn't know. As President Snow had pointed out, these mysterious Power Rangers seemed to alternate between protecting the common people of Panem from monsters and attacking the Districts on their own, with no clear rhyme or reason, to say nothing of how they had interfered with the last Hunger Games. Caesar could appreciate the wisdom in the Capitol keeping the extent of the Rangers' less public activities secret until they knew more about the true agenda of these multicoloured heroes, but it was still a strange feeling to be in a position where he didn't know something.
Ultimately, Caesar was fairly sure he was the one who was most keen to learn what the Rangers were actually up to, if only because he wanted to once again have all the facts as opposed to being left in the dark. He enjoyed his role in giving people the facts of the matter, but right now he frankly knew only what everyone else knew, and he was determined to change that soon.
Coriolanus Snow
The only true relief about the Power Rangers' activities recently was that it was at least increasingly easy to keep it contained. Snow was only aware of so much of what they had been through so far because they weren't exactly discreet, but at the same time they had more recently been operating a relatively significant distance away from populated areas. He only knew that they had still been active because he had access to more information than most, but he was aware that the general population still believed that the Rangers were out there even without concrete proof.
At this point, the only way he was going to deal with the Rangers for good was to publicly defeat them in some way that disproved the idea that they were any kind of hero, but the challenge lay in finding a way to pull that off. Frankly, the world was getting far too complicated for him to rely on the old tricks, but he could also recognise that he was too set in his ways for him to change his approach that easily. If he was going to adapt to the current chaos, he needed to gain new insight into his current enemies and the origin of those monsters…
The only excuse Snow would give himself later for not noticing how things had suddenly changed was that it was hardly a common occurrence to realise that plants were growing inside a building at a faster rate. By the time he registered how his office's roses had undergone accelerated growth, the plants were already gathered around his desk, forming into a distinctly humanoid appearance on the side opposite him.
Snow thought about trying to escape his office, but in a world where men and women in multicoloured armour fought beings made of living gold, he had a feeling that if these plants had come to kill him they would have done it already. With that view in mind, he simply sat in silence as the plant-humanoid gathered itself in front of him, forming a vague face with wide eyes and a mouth of sharp thorns in place of teeth.
"President Snow?" the plant-thing said, with a voice that seemed to be both male and female at the same time.
"Yes," Snow replied, his tone cool as he looked at the creature. "And you are?"
"I represent one who has experience of dealing with Power Rangers," the plant-thing responded. "And should you wish to remove them and a few other annoyances from your life, I have a proposition to offer that I am sure will be of considerable interest."
"Indeed?" Snow raised an eyebrow.
He wasn't one to accept another's word blindly, but any individual with the power to do something like this…
At the very least, it would be worth hearing what this person had to say.