The place was trashed. It almost hadn't been worth starting repairs, but now that he had committed to them he was stuck and surrounded by equipment that was arguably salvageable. Arguably being the key word. It was possible that the room itself wasn't even structurally sound, but as long as he knew that and was careful he didn't see any reason to mention it to anyone else.

Cam surveyed what was left of Ninja Ops with a sigh. As overwhelming as it seemed, he hadn't even been able to get to the mainframe yet. There were too many peripheral systems that needed to be brought online before he could even run a diagnostic. A lot of diagnostics, actually, but these particular self-repair programs were designed to work around software damage. The catastrophic hardware failure that he was currently facing was closer to what he'd expected from the zords, not the supercomputer that supported them.

The zords. That was a completely different problem, and one that he refused to devote any energy to until he had something working again. He tossed the tool he was using onto the ground--not so dramatic, considering that he was sitting on the ground already--and lifted his hands to his head. He buried his fingers in his hair, braced his elbows against his knees, and stared down at the floor.

This wasn't anyone's fault. Except maybe Lothor's, and he hadn't been returning calls lately. No forwarding address in the Abyss of Evil, it seemed. So Cam was left with no one on whom to vent his frustrations, a workload that would have made most people quit before they'd even started, and absolutely zero help. Not that he expected it. Not only was help a foreign concept to most of the people who had any reason to drop by, but there wasn't anyone qualified enough to work on these systems with him.

Okay, so he didn't expect help, but he still resented its lack.

The intruder alert blared abruptly, and he flinched. Lifting his head, he stared at it without comprehension for a long moment. The irony of the intruder alert being one of the few things to survive Lothor's invasion of the Ranger command center was matched only by Cam's confusion over the alert's activation. The only people who would be coming down here now were people who had been authorized to enter since this time last year.

It was probably broken. Cam rolled his eyes, pushing himself to his feet. Like everything else around here. He had gotten two of the peripherals up and running only to have them shut down again immediately due to internal errors. It would be just his luck to have the few working systems begin to spontaneously malfunction.

He made his way around the corner into the command center proper and he tensed up instinctively. She wasn't supposed to be here. She wasn't the enemy, he reminded himself, not anymore... but still. That explained the intruder alert.

Cam folded his arms and glared her down from behind. "What are you doing here?" he demanded.

Kapri started, dropping something that clattered to the floor when she whirled. "Cousin!" she exclaimed. "Hi! Hi there! How are you?" She laughed nervously. "I didn't think anyone else would be down here."

"You and the rest of the academy, apparently," Cam muttered. Kapri looked around as though she expected to see other people in the room with them. "Never mind," he said. "What are you doing here?"

"Um, well, you know..." She shrugged quickly, trying to smile. "Just passing through, really. I thought maybe I could--help?"

He stared at her, trying to process that. Her question had come at the end of a sentence so ridiculous that he had already been formulating a sarcastic retort, and now it was useless. "You want to... you thought you could what?" he asked at last.

"I want to help," she said eagerly. "I mean, we did kind of, well, blow some things up around here. I thought maybe I could... help put some of them back together?"

He closed his eyes. "That's very nice of you," he said, reminding himself that patience was more convincing if he didn't sound annoyed beyond all reason. "But most of this equipment isn't quite what you're used to working with." He had his doubts that she was used to working with anything, if it came to that, but he might as well try for some amount of civility toward someone who at least had good intentions.

"Oh, that's not true," Kapri assured him. "Where do you think Uncle got all of his technology? I paid lots of attention, believe me, I was right there any time he was explaining something. I so know how to work this stuff."

"Kapri, even I don't know how to work this 'stuff' right now and do you know why? Because it's broken! It doesn't work!" So much for being patient, a distant part of his brain thought ruefully. "So thanks, but no thanks; I can handle this myself!"

"Well, yeah, but you could at least use your own help, right?"

She was pathetically eager. He actually felt bad about being so mean to her, but he had too much to do to bother babying his wannabe helper. "Look," he began.

"I'm almost done," she promised. "Here, look--" She glanced around for whatever she had dropped, swept it up and pressed it against some part of the main processor.

"Hey, you shouldn't fool around with that," he said sharply, starting forward. What was she doing? "You could hurt someone--"

"Whoa!" The exclamation stopped him in his tracks. It hadn't come from Kapri.

She looked over her shoulder hopefully, catching his eye with a bright smile. "See? See, Cousin, I can totally help! I mean, I was the one who downloaded that virus into him in the first place so I thought, what better place to start, right? I'm really sorry about that, by the way; Uncle made it sound like the right thing to do and--"

"Dude, what happened to the home front?" an all-too-familiar voice interrupted. "Homie! Bro! Love the redecorating, but, like, maybe next time you could get Sister T to give you some tips or something!"

Cam turned around, slowly, already certain of what he would see.

His own reflection grinned back at him, the green knit cap slightly askew. The black t-shirt and camouflage pants were striking under a green work shirt that fluttered as CyberCam threw his arms out to the sides. "I'm ba-ack!" he sing-songed. "Back and better than ever, my carbon-based friends!"

"You did this," Cam said, staring at his cyber counterpart.

Kapri must have known the question was directed at her. "Shyeah," she said, in a tone that suggested he hadn't been the only one who was losing patience. "I do have talents, you know. What do you think we did on Uncle's ship? Cooked?"

He considered the image that provoked dispassionately. "No," he said aloud. "I didn't think you cooked."

"Speaking of cooked," CyberCam put in, "you know those satellite receivers you have outside? I hate to break it to you but they're not in such good shape, bro. I'm only getting signals from, like, one of them."

"I know they're--" Cam broke off mid-snap. "You're getting signals from one of them?"

"Yeah, and it doesn't look good," CyberCam said cheerfully. "There's monsters everywhere."

He hadn't been in Ninja Ops since the final showdown with Lothor. The entrance was different now, no longer buried under rubble but concealed some distance from the academy itself. The interior, unfortunately, was exactly the way he remembered it. Exactly the way they had left it, on their way to a confrontation with an evil space alien at the edge of the Abyss. He had known Cam was working down here, and vaguely, in the back of his mind, he'd thought that maybe Ninja Ops would be restored as magically as the rest of the academy.

Coming to a halt behind Tori at the bottom of the steps, Shane could see that he'd been wrong. However much he had wanted to deny the devastation that Lothor's master plan had left behind, nothing could change what had happened. It wasn't going to get better just because he didn't want to think about it. And Cam had been dealing with this every day... He couldn't find anything to say.

Dustin, as usual, had no trouble. Stopping beside Shane, he took one look around and exclaimed, "Dude, this place is a mess!"

"Yes, thank you for that observation, Dustin." Cam was as snippy as ever, but for once, Shane totally understood. "Sorry if I haven't had time to dust recently, but that's what happens when your uncle decides to throw dark ninja power around in a confined area."

"Hey, my uncle would never do that," Dustin protested. Then he paused, lifting one hand to point at Cam and then letting it fall again. "Oh, you were--talking about your uncle..." He trailed off. "Right."

"Cam," Tori said quietly. "Is there anything we can do to help?"

"Cousin, I think I have the--" The words suddenly stopped as Kapri caught sight of them. "Oh," she said, somewhat inadequately. "Hi."

"What's she doing here?" Shane asked suspiciously. He hadn't forgotten what her sister had done to Dustin.

"Helping." Cam's reply was curt. "I called you here to look at something. Something that I think may end up affecting all the local ninjas, since we're the ones who are going to have to contain them."

"Contain who?" Tori wanted to know.

Cam lifted one hand and gestured for them to follow. He led them over to his laptop, now perched on a mostly clear space beside what used to be the interface for the supercomputer. "CyberCam managed to get a patch on the satellite network, and what he found is nothing short of disturbing."

"Wait, CyberCam?" Dustin repeated. "I thought he was toast!"

"No, he just had this virus that me and Marah had downloaded into his programming!" Kapri began, then seemed to wilt under the attention. "Well, anyway. I fixed him."

"You fixed him?" Tori sounded incredulous.

Kapri gave her an annoyed look, and Shane interrupted before they could get sidetracked. Lifting his chin in Cam's direction, he asked, "What'd you find?"

"The generals that didn't end up back in the Abyss with Lothor." Cam brought up some kind of diagram on the screen of his laptop computer, and after a moment Shane recognized it as a map of Blue Bay Harbor. "They're out there, and they're not going away. They're laying low, like they're waiting for something."

"Lothor's return?" Tori suggested, frowning.

"Lothor's in the Abyss," Dustin interrupted. "I totally saw him go in."

"But he didn't take all of his generals with him," Shane pointed out. "The ninjas that you guys freed took out a lot of Lothor's goons, but I figured some of them must have escaped."

"So why haven't they, like, attacked or something?" Dustin wanted to know. "If they're not in the Abyss, why aren't they here?"

"They don't have Lothor to reinforce them anymore," Tori said. "He's not here to goad them into attacking, and he's not here to bail them out when it goes wrong. Like it always does," she added.

"So we have a bunch of evil alien generals hiding out around Blue Bay Harbor? Is there any way to track them? We can go--" Shane stopped, acutely aware of his bare left wrist. "We can get together a ninja team and go after them," he finished.

"We can't track anything right now," Cam told them. "This is a days' old rendering of the generals' former locations. We can't even pick up their energy signatures until they've been in one place for a certain amount of time, and our systems aren't anywhere near ready to support mobile tracking."

"Well, maybe they won't do anything," Dustin remarked. "I mean, they're just sitting there, right? Maybe they're trying to blend in or something. They could be, like, reformed evil aliens."

Shane exchanged glances with Tori. "We should be ready, just in case," she said diplomatically. "Cam, do you want to let the Thunders know about this? I'm on my way to lunch with Blake in--" One look at her watch made Tori change what she was about to say. "About three minutes ago. I can let him know what's going on then."

"I tried to contact Hunter right after I called you," Cam told her. "He's not answering his phone, so either he's busy or he forgot to turn it on again."

"Nah, he doesn't have it with him when he teaches," Shane said absently. "He should get his messages at lunch. Is there any way you can monitor local news from here? To make sure we're not missing anything big?"

"Like alien attacks?" Cam rolled his eyes. "I can monitor weather on the other side of the world but surprisingly I can't get a decent cable hookup out here. I guess we'll just have to ignore the situation and hope for the best."

"You're kidding," Dustin said uncertainly. He looked at Shane. "He's kidding, right?"

Cam was tapping keys on his computer, and Shane pointed at him wordlessly. A moment later, a new window sprang up and a miniature image of a news anchor spoke over the silence until Cam muted the sound. "Yes, Dustin," he said tiredly. "I'm kidding.

"Well, not about the cable hookup," Cam added as an afterthought. "But you don't really need one when you can tap into network feeds directly."

"Okay, there are generals, they're laying low, Cam's monitoring the situation," Tori said, already backing up. "Anything else?"

Cam stared after her, and Shane got ready for a sarcastic reply. But all he said was, "Say hi to Blake for us."

Tori clapped her hands together, pointed at him in obvious thanks, and waved to the rest of them as she turned to dart up the stairs toward the outside world.