The Spectacular Origin Story of Alien Fighters

First off, I don’t know, maybe I have some sort of dementia or something worse, because I always find it really hard to recall events clearly. And I’m just 17. 

What’s gonna happen when I’m like 50? Hmm! Maybe I'll forget how remotes work.

But today, I’ll try my best to piece together the epic rise of Alien Fighters as well as I can. But it's a very long tale, and I probably won't be able to tell it all in this post, so I'll tell it in parts.

Let’s drag the hands of the grand old clock back to 2021.

I was in my first term of Senior Secondary School 2 (aka Senior High School 2), and I had a thing for Power Rangers. I really wanted to write a story like that, but I didn’t. 

Maybe it wasn’t the right time yet. Maybe the stars hadn’t aligned. Maybe I was distracted by math homework (it was at it's peak then)

But then came a Christmas trip to the village. It's Akpugo, in Enugu State, Nigeria.

Now, my fellow Nigerians most probably know of our beef with electricity. We don't have constant power.

But it was made all the worse in the village where we didn't have a working TV. Even worse, I didn't have a phone, then.

So yeah, entertainment was non-existent. And naturally boredom came for a little stroll with… clubs.

At first, I tried finding novels to read. I later stumbled on a few moldy ones locked in a huge black drum that apparently belonged to my dad’s siblings. But most of them were ancient and falling apart. It was reading a child's scribbles. 

So fun didn’t last long.

And since I’m very introverted (as I confessed in my intro post. Read it here!), I couldn’t join my siblings in socializing with the neighborhood kids. They were busy rocking new friends while I was in here slowly turning into a locked up, decaying book myself.

That’s when Power Rangers popped back into my brain. Loud and bossy.

“WRITE ME! WRITE ME! WRITE MEEEEE!”

And just to spice things up, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Power Rangers movie cover a classmate had shown us back at school. The image was branded in my brain like a bad nightmare.

Something like this (but not it): 

But I had one major problem.

No book to write in.

Luckily, the universe was on my side. My siblings went to this Christmas party hosted by our local government chairman (they didn’t even tell us where they were going, so we spent that evening worried sick and hunting them down). But when they returned—oh hurray!—they brought gift bags.

Inside those bags? A notebook and a pen. (Yeah, cos, kids lovvvve those stuff).

I swiped my sister's notebook, elder brother style. Which included lots of begging and promises to pay back, all of which never happened.

After a few modifications to the book size so it looked like this:

I finally had my weapon.

I began writing my very first Power Rangers story out of boredom…

"Power Rangers: Ninja Strike"

It featured my friends from school as the Ranger. I was the Blue Ranger, of course. Our school became a ninja training academy. Our villains? Alien invaders (though back then, the worldbuilding was… let’s just say “still catching up”).

But the fun part was how much of the story was shaped by my friends reaction to the story when I returned to Lagos state the next year. It was a how I thought they would react VS how they actually did. Especially when I made myself the team leader instead of my best friend, who was technically the Red Ranger (look, I couldn’t let someone else be the star of my story!).

Every thing aided the story's plot, even my crush as at that time. 

Anyways it's that story I would later reimagine to be Alien Fighters (with a little help from Percy Jackson, of course), but that’s a story for another day. Hmm… maybe tomorrow 😉

So now I want to hear from you. What’s the best thing you’ve ever created or done out of pure boredom?

Boredom can be a pain in the butt, I know, but it can also be a valuable weapon if weilded rightly.

—Henry.