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She goes out traveling, and then she wonders what it is she should do. Standing on some unfamiliar World for the first time, breathing its air.
She probably should have thought of what to do, beforehand.
(Tsukasa would figure it out, but she isn’t like him. Even now. Now is the time to figure out who she is , not who she isn’t and will never be.)
She wanders from the field, out past a forest, into an encampment. It seems in her desire to get far away from anything she’d known, she’s found herself in the aftermath of an apocalypse. It’s been generations, and things have begun to grow again.
“The birds have just returned here,” another girl says, after she’s stayed a few days. “I didn’t think they were real.”
“Is that so?” Sayo asks. The girl nods.
“Grandma told me her parents showed her pictures, drawings made by the Lost Arts, of the Ruins before the End,” she says. “They were lost, but I always wondered…”
Sayo stares at the girl.
“Do you want to see?” She asks, and the girl blinks.
“See what?”
“What a World like yours would look before the end.”
The girl laughs.
“I couldn’t,” she says. “The nearest Ruins are two weeks on foot, and that’s if the Monsters don’t get us.”
Sayo shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “Watch.”
She opens a veil, and the girl gasps.
She leaves that World knowing a girl had gone beyond her World, still held photographs of Potential in her possession.
She realizes she likes it.
“Are you okay?”
Sayo looks quickly up at the other girl in the alley.
( An impossibility , her mind supplies to her, somehow.)
“Headache,” she says. She’s been getting them for the past month, two thirds of her wanderings, and she truly doesn’t know why. The other runs up to her, helping her stand. These headaches are odd, though; flashes of images and a feeling of something foreign, internal, and indescribably vast all at once beat alongside her heart.
“Where are you staying?” The girl asks, and Sayo thinks she rattles off the hotel in this World. She finds she usually has a good amount of money in her pocket, when she enters a new one.
The other nods and leads her to a motorcycle.
“I’ll give you a ride,” she says. Sayo nods.
“My name’s Yuriko,” the girl says, when they arrive. “And you?”
“Sayo,” Sayo replies. “You… want to come in for a bit?”
Yuriko smiles, nodding.
“And so I’m looking for my partner, Kamen Rider Stronger,” Yuriko says, explaining. “I don’t know where he went, and it seems like he just… doesn’t exist.”
Sayo freezes.
“You know, it’s funny,” Yuriko laughs. “I can’t remember separating from him, in the first place.”
When Yuriko leaves later in the day, driving seemingly unwittingly through a dimension veil and into a war zone, Sayo starts to run .
The ironic thing about running, sometimes it takes you exactly to the place you’re trying to avoid. In this case, it’s a restaurant where, when she says she’s a traveler of Worlds, the girl at the counter, a few years younger than Sayo herself says “Oh, like Tsukasa.”
Sayo blinks.
“What?”
“Tsukasa and his friends passed through our World two months ago,” the girl replies. “He… helped me a lot.”
“He… did.”
Sayo can’t keep the incredulousness out of her voice. Even knowing he’d changed, it’s odd, hearing this Tsukasa who is not selfish and cruel and empty, but the one Mayu describes as caring and loud and surrounded by friends.
“I’m sorry, what did you say your name was again?” The girl asks.
“Sayo,” Sayo replies between mouthfuls of food. “Just… just Sayo.”
After that, though she keeps wandering, she also continues to return to Tendou Oden. Mayu’s World feels odd, like it’s edged with something all-consuming and dangerous, but the shop feels like a haven.
Nonetheless, it worries her. The headaches, the girl who’d wandered into hell and felt like impossibility, and now Mayu’s World, falling apart at the seams.
She worries quietly, however. Mayu is quiet in her stories, and Sayo has a feeling there are things she’s still hiding.
Perhaps it’s involved, perhaps it isn’t, and she doesn’t know which…
It’s not until almost another month later that she finally understands. She sees it all, the Worlds, the destruction, Tsukasa…
“Decade is gone,” she says, and it feels like her voice echoes . “The Riders will return, and the Worlds are saved.”
…and then she passes out, right in front of Tendou Oden.