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“Did I ever tell you how my family was chosen by Oma Zi-O?” Shu asks.
“I figured it might be a rude thing to ask,” Woz asks. Shu laughs.
“Yeah,” he says. “I… our family is from Fuuto, actually. Oma Zi-O requested my aunt specifically, to be his chief investigator. She was twenty, and my dad was two, and their parents had died when Oma Zi-O pur— decimated the entire planet. Oma Zi-O promised them hope and safety, and she agreed.”
“I… see,” Woz says. “That is an interesting origin story. So your aunt is…”
Shu nods.
“Aunt Shouko was amazing,” he says. “She always taught us to question, like how we all know of the Kamen Riders but nothing about them seems fully real.”
Woz tenses at the words “Kamen Riders”. He can’t help it, because Shu has a point. The statues of them exist across the world, but they don’t seem to exist in anything from before Oma Zi-O’s rise.
And he can’t help but think of the strange man who had faulted them for Oma’s rise.
But somehow even the people in the wastes seem to think of them as heroes.
He doesn’t trust it, maybe. Not fully.
“I see,” is all he says aloud. Shu sighs.
“She disappeared a few months before our parents told me and Gates to run,” he says. “I try not to think about what that probably means.”
“I’m sorry,” Woz says. “I understand.”
He thinks about his family, and he truly does.
A man in the wastes, alone and dressed like any other wanderer Woz has ever seen except for the bright, perfectly preserved magenta camera around his neck.
“You aren’t quite a denizen of this world, are you?” He asks, calmly.
Woz is distrustful of strangers like this. The stranger reminds him of…
“This is just an end result of them .”
Whoever that other strange man was, but more .
And yet.
“I believe you will find many like me,” he says. “In this world.”
The man looks around, shamelessly snapping a photo of Woz.
“Tell me more, then,” he says.
(“Who are you?” Woz asks, as the man moves to leave, and he turns back to Woz with simple disinterest.
“I’m just a passing through Kamen Rider,” he says. “Remember that.”
And then he walks through a grey veil that closes behind him.
Kamen Rider…)
They move from a comparatively larger force to a smaller tactical unit. Woz quickly finds himself in command, age and childhood skills allowing for it. The work is hard, and it never feels like they get anywhere at all.
The nature of fighting someone who is all but a god, he supposes.
It’s on days where the fighting is hardest that he finds himself asleep in a pile of sleeping mats beside Tsukiyomi, Shu, and Keito. It eases the nightmares, the terror, the grief, even if it doesn’t erase them.
One night he finds himself awake while the others sleep, however.
He wanders outside, instead.
Tsukuyomi’s on guard duty, of course.
“Woz?” She asks. “What are you doing up?”
“Wondering,” Woz says, simply. “No one remembers Kamen Riders, yes we still believe in them.”
“We know that they were heroes,” Tsukuyomi says. “And that Ohma Zi-O fought them. I don’t think he’d make them up.”
Woz nods.
“It could just be a scare tactic,” he says. “Or hope for us, that there were heroes, at least once.”
“Is there a reason you’re asking me this?” Tsukuyomi asks, her gaze piercing. Woz looks away.
“Not in particular,” he says. “But if they are heroes, and there were so many… why couldn’t they stop Ohma Zi-O?”
The girl has no response, for that. Woz sighs into the heavy silence.
“I apologize, Tsukuyomi,” he says. “Merely idle musing.”
“Of course,” Tsukuyomi snarks.
But both know empty words when they hear them.