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The story of Kadoya Tsukasa begins when he’s ten years old, and his sister is six, and both of them are helpless. Their mother’s body is still on the ground, but Oya-San had exploded. She wasn’t human, it happened.
Small comfort such facts are to two children who lost their parents.
What’s left of Oya-San’s hatchmates stay, for a time, but it doesn’t last. They’d taken care of each other, when Dai-Shocker went into their caves, killed off so many of their people. They trust Tsukasa and Sayo to do the same.
They aren’t monsters. Neither is Tsukasa. But what can you ask of a child who just wants to forget the feeling of his mother’s corpse in his arms?
He just wants to forget.
The story of Kadoya Sayo starts when she’s six years old, and her brother is ten, and both of them are helpless. She’s sobbing and clinging to him as the murderer leaves, unrecognizable as far as she can tell. She doesn’t care that Tsukasa is clinging to their mom. She doesn’t care about the blood.
She goes home and doesn’t want to go outside even to the yard, not anymore.
Oya-san’s hatchmates help. They teach her and her brother human foods they don’t understand and don’t taste like mama’s endless experiments, let Sayo bury herself in their fur, nowhere near as comfortable as Oya-san’s had been.
And then they leave.
Sayo wants to get out, but she’s so scared.
Tsukasa isn’t a monster for walking through that portal, is he? It’s an out that he desperately needs. Sayo calls for him, and he waves at her to follow, but she can’t.
It wasn’t… it wasn’t hard .
Sayo must just be afraid.
He comes back and tells her all about it. Maybe this will help her. Something has to help her. He doesn’t know how.
The veils keep not opening to her. Tsukasa keeps traveling further. He buys a camera, to show Sayo even more of the worlds.
They come out wrong.
Sayo pushes at the walls, desperately trying to follow her brother. But he’s smiling, free. He keeps leaving her behind.
This was her gift, her one little hideaway from reality, but she can’t even reach it. Instead, Tsukasa can.
He keeps getting further away. She keeps moving further in. His pictures and his stories do nothing but taunt her.
The veils keep not opening to her. Tsukasa keeps traveling further. She wants him to stay, but he never listens.
Slowly, loss morphs into bitterness.
Tsukasa discovers Kamen Riders rather quickly. His name is Yongou, according to the media, but Tsukasa had watched “Yongou’s” transformation fade into a normal mad. He follows at a distance.
“Yongou” it seems is in fact Godai Yusuke. He wears his symbol on his clothes. He fights monsters and wins. It’s like a dream, to Tsukasa.
To fight the monsters and win.
But he’s a monster, the spawn of a monster. He can’t understand this World where everything moral seems reversed. He can’t understand, but he can’t help but keep looking. Watching Kamen Riders.
Kamen Riders, they’re monsters. And yet they’re heroes.
Tsukasa doesn’t know what to do. Heroes aren’t supposed to win. So he gets to know the monsters across the Worlds, the Riders who remain among them.
He wonders why it still feels wrong.
He keeps going, regardless.
Sayo always wants to know what the World she’s on has happening. Watching the Worlds is ruined by Tsukasa, who always leaves her longing for something she can’t do. So she asks. She finds out about highs and lows. She finds out when Dai-Shocker finally controls the planet.
Tsukikage is the most common visitor. He’s there because he had helped Mama and Oya-San destroy the previous leaders of Dai-Shocker. He’s interested in her powers.
He’s the first person to ask her permission to cross through her veils.
But Oya-san’s hatchmates visit too. They bring gifts, they offer comfort, Sayo keeps finding it harder to take it.
She learns the piano to fill time. She stops dreaming about joining Tsukasa.
She loses herself, more and more.
Tsukasa keeps running.
Sayo keeps hiding.
It’s impossible, like this, to reach each other.
(Call them monsters, but they’re just kids.)