Disclaimer: I do not own the Power Rangers, they belong to their respective copyright owners and are used here without permission. No money is being made from this fic. In addition some of the history in this universe is adapted and mangled from the Star Wars universe and belongs to the respective copyright owners.
Rise to Glory
Many of the races selected by The Celestials had frowned upon the use of magic. Some like the Maltusians had even tried to contain it before understanding that it was too prevalent to contain. The Time Lords had gone even further, attempting to obliterate all traces of magic and magical creatures from the cosmos while actively hunting those that sought to use such destructive power. Despite the efforts of both races though magic could not be completely vanquished because it was a fundamental part of existence and had been woven into the fabric of reality since before the universe had formed. So, while they managed to hide magic away and pretend it did not exist, vast dimensions of untapped magical energy remained waiting for those skilled enough to break the seals and call upon the power that waited for them. Of course there were some that decided that if they could not eliminate magic from the cosmos, they should learn to control it at its source by mastering the secrets of Grid Energy.
One such race lived in the far reaches of the universe, upon a planet ill-suited to sustain life. Existence was a struggle and a challenge. Their ancestors had benefited from The Celestials' intervention, but the need to survive had diverted their attention from developing that knowledge. For generations the people of Planet M-97744-N struggled to survive on a planet prone to intense storms caused by Grid Energy leaking through its atmosphere. To endure against such elements required them to find ways to deal with the wild fluctuations of untamed power and the creation of vast engines capable of drawing, channelling and controlling the intense power. The creation of the powerful machines allowed them to not only stop the severe storms, but to use the energy to power their homes. They even managed to use the same destructive energy that had made life so treacherous for them to power shields that protected their world from invasion.
The Morphin Engines were powerful but crude and limited in what they could achieve. The scientists worked to evolve their technology, creating places where the energy could be used for creating instead of destruction. They called the Power Forges, although years later they would be known as Master Forges. With the Master Forges it was possible to channel the volatile energy into objects or even living beings although too much energy was known to be fatal.
And as they found ways of controlling the uncontrollable, their understanding of the science behind the power grew. They developed an understanding that was partly science and partly religious. They developed a philosophy that allowed them to safely interact with the power. They traced the energy back to its source and there they uncovered the secrets of a dimension that wove itself through reality. There they identified a vast pool of energy, unique due to the presence of magical, spiritual and psychic energy in peaceful coexistence. It had a vast number of frequencies and wavelengths, from so far as they could tell it in some way linked to every particle of matter, including all living beings.
They called it the Morphin Grid due to the the way it wove in and out of the normal universe. They found that with the correct application the amazing transformations the Grid could cause were limitless. They were unaware that their new discovery was actually just the relearning of truths that had been hidden away by other parties. Although once their research suggested that the Morphin Grid was somehow alive and that the individual energies that filled the dimension could take on the forms of living beings, they came to realise that somebody had been acting to limit their research. That discovery pressed them to look harder. Instead of fearing it as the Time Lords had done, they chose to study it, to understand it and to master its gifts.
Inadvertently, the Morphin Masters became the leaders that others had tried to be. They didn't preach how the population should live but led by their own examples of duty. Their teachings brought in students seeking to learn their ways. They built colleges where ideas could be exchanged and temples where the spiritual side of the Morphin Grid and its living entities could be carefully considered.
Their lives passed with learning and insight, growing beyond the limitations of the universe. They created new and advanced technologies guided by the Morphin Grid as the psychic energy within unified their consciousness. They created new technology, weapons, protections, and machines that could use the power of the Morphin Grid to heal. Through experimentation that lasted millions of years they gained an understanding of dimensional engineering and developed their own ways to move beyond across space without the limitations of space flight.
Eventually they reached the point in their studies where they felt that there was little more that they could uncover about the Morphin Grid from the outside. To unlock its greater secrets, they needed to venture beyond their dimension and into the Morphin Grid itself. And so, they gathered at the Transdimensional Gateway they had constructed for the purposes of exploration and after locating a point of entry, left their reality behind, vowing they would return to share their knowledge.
The machinery they used to leave shut down following their departure and nobody seemed capable of reactivating it. It remained silent for a long time as it awaited instructions from the other side. The Master Arch as some chose to name it was eventually abandoned as the Morphin Masters were believed gone forever.
More time passed and the universe continued to grow and evolve. The Morphin Masters became beings of legend. Much of their knowledge and teachings had been gathered in the years following their disappearance and was hoarded in places where scholars studied to try and recovered the wisdom that had seemingly left alongside the Morphin Masters. Their creations were either added to personal collections and hidden away in places others could not steal them or handed out to warriors to fight in the names of the Morphin Masters and what society felt were their beliefs.
As the centuries progressed more and more of the discoveries made by the Morphin Masters were forgotten. The weapons and protective garments they had created to aid them in their exploration of the universe remained as strong as they day they were created, but the art of making more had been lost. It was possible to duplicate the material, but the properties that had enhanced those items beyond the mundane were lost.
And so those left behind did the only thing they could: they sought and hoarded anything they could find that was related to the Morphin Masters out of fear that their rivals might do the same. Those with the resources travelled the cosmos in search of the most powerful artefacts. Items created by the Morphin Masters were considered priceless even if they were simple cooking utensils. Kings and generals paid top price for the protective clothing the Morphin Masters had developed. They dressed themselves as great warriors and proclaimed themselves to be the natural successors of those that came before. Meanwhile, governments fortunate enough to secure a supply of weapons and clothing created their own armies protected by Morphin Master technology. And for the individual who stumbled upon a stash of Morphin Master forged armour, his career as an armed mercenary meant he would never be poor again as his services were always in high demand.
As for the families that the Morphin Masters had left behind: they were widely ignored and treated as outcasts by a cosmos that no longer recognised their worth. Displaced from their homes as those seeking relics of the Morphin Masters gathered anything they could, the descendants set out on their own journey. As they spread out among the stars, they created new places where knowledge and understanding could be found by those seeking it for the right reasons. They also took it upon themselves to secure and hide some of the Morphin Masters' greatest and most dangerous discoveries.
Throughout history those descendants spread out, hiding their heritage to preserve the secrets they kept on behalf of their ancestors. They would be responsible for the founding of organisations that would one day spread across the cosmos bringing hope in the growing darkness. And members of their tribe would gain fame as heroic warriors in the fight against evil who would go on to train some of the universe's greatest warriors. Others would use their name, but when the records were reviewed long after the original Morphin Masters departed, their descendants would be the ones spoken about as legends.
"There is a dimension that runs parallel to our own through the entirety of existence. It is my belief that this dimension is somehow connected to every location in the cosmos and that by accessing it, we can use this dimension to traverse the stars.
This dimension is unlike any other we have uncovered. I believe that it is a realm of energy constantly shifting and changing. But despite its fluid state, it can still be mapped and navigated. I have named it: The Morphin Grid."
The teachings of the first pioneers were known to every student of the Power. They had been raised to understand the history of their race and the theories that had guided them from a simple means to avoid the need for long space flights to a deep understanding of the extra-dimensional energies that lay beyond. In the early days the energy contained within the Morphin Grid had seemed unimportant. As time had progressed, the need to understand and master those energies had become their primary concern. A whole doctrine had grown out of their findings.
They had not been the ones to coin the phrase Morphin Masters, although that was how they were now known. They had originally been a simple race of survivors from a world ravaged by violent energy storms caused by the planet's interaction with the Morphin Grid. Their survival had led to understanding and mastery of their environment. Others had heard of their accomplishments and had joined them. And through generations they had formed a new society that both worshipped and studied the wonders of the Morphin Grid.
It had been through the sacrifice of one of their greatest pioneers, a man whose name had been celebrated after he made the first long distance trip through the Morphin Grid to a distant planet. His continued exploration allowed the Morphin Masters to establish Master Forges and Morphin Engines on key planets across the galaxy. By the time of his final journey that Master Arch technology would form the basis of travel to countless worlds within their galaxy, travel beyond the boundaries oftheir galaxy and into the wider cosmos. But his name while revered by his people would be lost to the masses in favour of his title: he was the Morphinaut.
Sadly, the Morphinaut had been lost during his attempt to prove that there was a physical realm within the confines of the Morphin Grid and that despite previous theories, the Grid was more than just a dimension of energy. His exact fate had never been uncovered, but it seemed that the chosen destination had not been friendly; strangely in years to come there would be reports of the Morphinaut appearing and then fading back into the Grid. His loss was the reason why following his success the Morphin Masters had slowed their efforts, learning as much as they could through slow and steady progress.
Following the Morphinaut's success the Morphin Masters started to study the Morphin Grid as something more than just an easy means of transportation. With their archway technology perfected to where they could cross whole galaxies at a time - for despite their best efforts they had never been able to replicate the Morphinaut's initial success - they considered what other secrets that strange dimension could hold.
They had speculated for generations how vast the Morphin Grid was, but the truth had still shocked them. They had long maintained that the Morphin Grid spread throughout the cosmos - the Morphinaut's theories had speculated that the Morphin Grid actually extended beyond their initial theories and touched all dimensions within their universe.
Regardless, the sheer power the Morphin Grid contained was astounding. Their attempts to tap into the Morphin Grid to draw upon its power had been a disaster, killing over a dozen workers before the breach had been sealed. It had revealed just how potent and dangerous the Power could be in its raw state.
Over thousands-of-years of study they came to realise that the Power was not comprised of a single form of energy. The Power was the combination of many types of energy that came to rest inside the boundaries of the Morphin Grid. Later they changed their theory to state that the many types of energy within the Morphin Grid all came from the breakdown of the Power into its less volatile components.
The Morphin Masters also drew the conclusion that the reason the Morphin Grid seemed connected to every point of space was because the Power flowed to every point of space and that the Morphin Grid had been designed by some unknown force to contain and control the raw Grid Energy, to prevent it running wild and killing anything it touched. That led to other questions about what sort of being would be capable of accomplishing such a feat, possibly at a time when the universe itself was a distant dream, but those questions were shelved in favour of studying the Grid.
The Morphin Masters worked tirelessly to build on their research, searching for ways to detect and measure the presence of the Power in different locations. And in doing so discovered that there were weaknesses in the dimensional barriers that allowed energy from the Morphin Grid to leak back into reality. In fact some forms of energy appeared completely unrestricted and they agreed that that was intentional.
Like others before them, the Morphin Masters' studies allowed them to identify the main types of energy that could be extracted from Grid Energy; spiritual energy, psychic energy and magical energy, along with two types that were deemed too powerful to use and considered catastrophic to draw upon. Each type of energy held its own properties and behaviours. However, they soon discovered that there were more types of energy present than they first believed. They had wrongly assumed that Grid Energy and magic were the same when in fact they behaved in different ways. Grid Energy shared properties with all of the other types of energy, but was extremely dangerous.
However, in leaking through the boundaries of the Morphin Grid, the energy became less volatile without losing its potency. Raw Grid Energy especially was radically altered in the process although it was still almost impossible to control and extremely dangerous to touch. The Morphin Masters wisely chose not to attempt to study some of the other energy types they detected, realising that doing so would put their equipment and their lives at risk.
While the Time Lords had fought to remove all traces of magic from the universe and the Guardians of Oa had done all in their power to contain it and dissuade others from using it, the Morphin Masters chose to experiment with all forms of the Power although most of their research would be directed at understanding how Grid Energy worked.
They concluded that while spiritual energy appeared to be the weakest type of energy, when drawn upon in the right way using the primitive techniques the Morphin Masters developed, it could be extremely powerful. In fact upon more detailed inspection the Morphin Masters grew to understand that this energy was to be found in all living things and was essential ingredient for life to grow on a planet; without it the cosmos would collapse.
Psychic energy was not as widespread but leaked through in greater concentrations, allowing those that possessed the ability to channel it to perform greater feats. However the effects of psychic energy required a great deal of concentration to sustain them.
In comparison magic was by far the more potent form of energy, but the most difficult to control. Unlike psychic energy there did not seem to be any biological requirements to use it.
And then there was Grid Energy. Grid Energy was extremely powerful, difficult to control and if not handled carefully, could cause immense damage to the environment.
With each discovery the Morphin Masters shared their knowledge with others, allowing them to conduct their own research, much to the chagrin of the government of Gallifrey who had according to their ambassadors, erased magic from their own society and were not pleased that others were reintroducing it to the universe at large.
However despite their best efforts not to fall into the trap that others had stumbled upon in the past, the Morphin Masters had failed to account for the arrogance of those they worked with. When the Morphin Masters gave their first theories about the nature of the Morphin Grid, others reached the assumption that they were correct and went on to preach that this was the way that the Morphin Grid worked.
Self-appointed experts on the subject spread the mistaken belief that the Morphin Grid was composed of a single form of energy broadcast on thirty different wavelengths. A whole belief structure would emerge around those 'facts' and despite later discoveries, this theory of how the Grid worked would remain in place long after the Morphin Masters had passed on.
In fact the power structure that had been described was only a small part of the Morphin Grid. The Grid was made up of countless variations of magical, psychic and spiritual energy. It was not a pool of power as the Morphin Masters had first believed, nor a raging river, or even a vast ocean... it was a combination of all those things contained within the thin walls of an endless dimension.
Over the course of millions of years the Morphin Masters unlocked the secrets of the Morphin Grid, using their knowledge to build vast wonders throughout the cosmos. At first their creations were scientific in nature using the Morphin Grid as a powers source, but as their knowledge, skill and confidence grew, their creations became more organic in design. Stones and crystals replaced the printed circuit board and microchip as the Morphin Masters evolved alongside the Power.
Eventually the time came when the Morphin Masters felt they had discovered everything they could about the Morphin Grid from the outside. Their facilities were spread throughout space and their inventions had found their way into the hands of some of the most celebrated heroes... and reviled villains.
After a confrontation with a monstrous villain that had attempted to force his way into the lower planes, the Morphin Masters decided that they needed the knowledge they could only find inside the Morphin Grid, where they could embrace its power. And so they took the next step toward enlightenment, using their archway technology to transport themselves into the Morphin Grid for the first time.
End of part.
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