While neither "Not a Waste" nor "No Room for Regrets" shall probably ever be put in a list of my greatest fics, I am proud that I managed to cross two very unrelated series and made it work.

When writing "Not a Waste", I had some guidelines to work from because the two series were unrelated, and also because of plot necessities. They were as follows:

* Time Force takes place in 2001 and 3000.
* E:FC takes place at some point in the near future, later than 2001 (the characters mention the "SI" or "'01" war every so often in the past tense).
* There are obviously no Taelons in 3000, but there are apparently other aliens on Earth at that time. (An Aquitian apparently in the trial room in FFtF1 and Trip isn't human as far as we know either.)
* The year at the start is 3000, not AC 995 or so, so the dating system has to have changed between the events of E:FC and the future.
* Not related to meshing the two series, but "No Room for Regrets" established that Wes was in control of BioSynth, while he parts ways with his father in "A Parting Of Ways". This was because "Regrets" was written before I saw "Ways".

I worked the details out as follows:

* The Taelons had to be driven off. The E:FC episode "Dark Matter" had the mothership hit by a piece of dark matter which caused all the Taelons to enter a form of stasis. I reasoned that if Da'an and the rest of the Taelons on Earth had been on the ship instead of onplanet, then the ship could go off and be an easy target for the Jaridians.
* Also in "Dark Matter", we establish that Sandoval hates his Taelon masters with a passion. In addition, he's not beyond appearing as a hero to the general populace. Not only that, but he has ties to the Jaridians (established previously). So, what better way of getting rid of the whole Taelon/Jaridian war but by having the Jaridians take care of the Taelons and then convince them that we're innocents?
* There is no Taelon tech in 3000, therefore it seems reasonable that the Jaridians could have demanded we destroy all the Taelon tech as we possibly could. This also explains why E:FC holograms are so nice and neat and Time Force's are all flickery and odd-colored.
* Since the SI war happens in 2001, it's entirely possible that the rest of the world did see the Power Rangers as people in costumes.

One other plot-related constraint that I had to use was to establish that the Time Force Rangers were the only Rangers that had ever shown up on Earth. Otherwise, it would have made more plot sense to show the Taelons investigating Angel Grove or Mariner Bay, the two previous PR locations, and this was meant as a follow-up to "Regrets", which is placed in Silver Hills. Therefore, in this universe, Earth is pretty much left alone and we don't get the idea for Rangers until much later in the future.

Other than that were little details: Wes still doesn't have much to do with his father after "A Parting of Ways", but I couldn't see Mr. Collins completely relinquishing control of his company to strangers, so I had him give it to Wes. My reasoning, as Wes says in the story, was that Mr. Collins couldn't bear to run a subsidiary but couldn't bear to give BioSynth up. I suspect the company went belly-up with the coming of the Taelons and their biotechnology.

Katie is from the thirtieth century, and therefore it makes sense that she knows about Liam's true origin. Also, as Wes says, she is their canary: there is a very strict set of events that must happen for her future and therefore her to exist. (I won't go into time travel aspects here, but a lot of things would be messed up if something went wrong, quite possibly causing a temporal paradox.)

But, in the end, the story finished and Wes and Katie were quite happy (as I was) to see the end.