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It was unfair, Takeru thought, that a Kamen Rider who saved the city from the Ganmeisers should be so soundly defeated by math homework.
For the 5th time that hour, he thumped his head down on his folded arm, rolling his pencil between his fingers and staring blankly at the equations he was supposed to be solving. Normally, Akari helped him with his math, but she was busy in the lab with her own projects today.
Javert had very quickly become wise to Takeru’s poor study habits, and would rope Narita and Shibuya into helping him with chores when he knew Takeru was supposed to be doing his schoolwork and would likely be phishing for distractions. Even Yurusen has proven to be a traitor. How a cat can manage to tattle, he’ll never understand.
He’d only tried asking the heroic eyecons for help once. Takeru had figured if anybody knew how to help him with physics equations, the mathematically-inclined spirits of Newton and Edison would be able to find the answers easily. The spirits had fought with each other over how to properly solve the equation so loudly that Takeru was certain everyone in the temple could hear them, whether they could see and hear the spirits or not.
Takeru rolled the pencil too hard, and it went right over the side of the table. Heaving a great sigh, he picked his head up from his arm and leaned over to grab it back up.
When his phone vibrated in his pocket, Takeru nearly shouted with joy. Finally, relief from his torment. He looked around first, to make sure nobody else was nearby. Everyone in the temple was out to get him.
It’s a text message from Emu. After the Pac-Man Incident, most of the Riders on the scene had exchanged numbers in case of more emergencies. Takeru spoke to Emu the most. Haruto rarely responded, though he’d given them the number for another rider named Gentaro (who’d greeted Takeru with the immediate declaration that they were friends and promised to help him out should he ever need it). Shinnosuke was often busy with work and his growing family, and texts to Kouta never made it through.
From: Emu
Hiiro yelled at me again :( this is the second time today!
To: Emu
What was it for this time?
From: Emu
I didn’t tie the tourniquet tight enough before drawing from my patient i guess? He said the angle was wrong earlier too
His friend recently started on his surgical rotation, and the doctor and fellow rider in charge of Emu’s learning was a stickler for perfection. Emu often complained that Hiiro harshly criticized every little thing he did, down to the angle he was holding his tools.
Takeru frowned at his phone. Emu was so busy all the time, keeping up with his work and his fight against the increasing threat of the bugster virus. He wished he could help his friend; The hospital Emu worked at wasn’t terribly far from the temple. But fighting against the bugsters required a special driver and training, and Takeru didn’t know the first thing about being a doctor.
Another text pulled him from his thoughts.
From: Emu
Have you met Eiji yet?
To: Emu
Eiji? That was Shinnosuke’s son, right?
From: Emu
Nope! Well yes, but I’m talking about kamen rider OOO
To: Emu
I don’t think I have
From: Emu
He was out of the country until recently. Gentaro says he travels a lot! Eiji came to visit me today with a project he was working on, but I couldn’t really help him much with it. I was thinking maybe you would know more about how to help him?
Takeru sat up from his slump against the table.
To: Emu
What do you mean?
From: Emu
Souls of the dead and stuff. You know a lot more about that sort of thing, when the dead are bound to something.
This was a lot more interesting than his math textbooks.
To: Emu
I’d be happy to help!
From: Emu
Great! I’ll let Eiji know. I think he said he was going to visit some friends first.
“Master Takeru.”
Takeru yelped and dropped his phone.
Javert stood over him, his frown more pronounced than usual. Narita and Shibuya huddled in the doorway, shooting Takeru sympathetic expressions.”You are supposed to be doing your assignments.”
“Uh… I was… taking a break?”
Javert crossed his arms. Takeru thumped his forehead against the table, resigning himself to getting back to his homework.
Javert tattled to Onari, who tattled to Akari, who decided to confiscate Takeru’s phone during homework sessions despite his protests that taking a break was good for the mind.
In the week that followed, Takeru completely forgot that another rider he hadn’t met was coming to visit until Shibuya mentioned, one afternoon, that there was an oddly dressed man in the courtyard.
“He was asking about you, but I didn’t know if I should tell him you were here or not, what with,” Shibuya waved a vague hand around, “Everything that’s happened these last few years.”
Remembering Emu’s texts to him the previous week, Takeru thanked Shibuya and ran through the temple to see to the visitor.
The man standing in the courtyard was, in a word, bright. It wasn’t necessarily his clothes (though they were patterned nicely), or the neon underwear affixed to his walking stick. He held himself with confidence, moving with the grace of someone sure of themselves. He radiated power in Takeru’s enhanced senses in the way only a rider could.
This had to be Eiji.
“Hello!” He called as Takeru started down the steps, hurrying over to meet him. “You must be Tenkuuji-san, right? I’m Eiji.”
“Just Takeru is fine,” he said, taking Eiji’s hand as he held it out to shake. Eiji’s hands were warm. Takeru felt a little guilty about his own, which were almost always freezing now after his time as a ghost. If Eiji was bothered by it, though, he didn’t say anything.
Eiji nodded. “Emu told me about this place. The temple is beautiful! You must work very hard.”
Takeru couldn’t help the surge of pride, and he puffed out his chest a little. “It’s been in my family for generations.”
“That’s incredible!” Eiji grinned as Takeru led him up the stairs and further into the temple. “I’ve found that places like this, with a long history, always have a special sort of character to them, like you can feel the weight of the years on them.”
“Emu said you traveled a lot. You must have seen so many amazing temples. Have you ever seen the Nalanda ruins in India?”
“Yes, it was incredible! I learned so much while I was there. The museum had a lot of nice pieces, too.”
Takeru could barely hold himself back from badgering Eiji with more questions about the ruins. The heroic eyecons were not particularly talkative even on good days, and Sanzō spoke more of the teachings of his long pilgrimage than in describing the details of the temples he’d visited.
Eiji must have noticed he was nearly vibrating with excitement, and added even more fuel to the fire. “Do you like studying temples, Takeru?”
“I’ve always really enjoyed the history of them. When I was little, my father took me on a trip to visit some of the bigger temples in Kyoto, and he told me all about them while we visited. That was what really sparked it all.”
Eiji hummed as they entered the inner household. After they’d both taken a seat at the low table, he said, “You’re the head priest here, right? I’m sure it’s great to have a hobby that lines up with your work so well.”
Onari and his father had thought so as well, at least until Takeru had started to fall behind in his training in favor of studying his history books. Instead of saying this to Eiji, he only offered a cheeky grin and said, “Yep!”
“Well I’m happy to tell you more, then! It’s not often people from home want to listen to me for the little details.” Eiji leaned over the table in an almost conspiratory manner, and Takeru leaned closer accordingly.
This was how Akari found them an hour later, deep in a discussion about the architectural styles of older temples.
She bustled through the door, then paused, eyes falling on Eiji. “Oh, hello! I didn’t know we had guests.”
“Akari, this is Eiji! The rider I told you was going to visit?”
Akari came around the table to sit next to Takeru and nod to Eiji. “It’s nice to meet you. Emu told us you were visiting about-” She stopped, eyes on the empty expanse of table, before turning her head sharply to Takeru.
Takeru, please tell me you offered Eiji refreshments.”
Takeru stared at her. And stared.
Eiji coughed quietly.
“Takeru! Are you serious?”
“We were in the middle of a conversation! It would have been ruder to just leave Eiji in the middle of it-”
“Go!” Akari shoved at his shoulder and Takeru slumped to the side. “Go and make some tea right now!”
Takeru ducked his head, embarrassed, and got up to scurry into the kitchen. “I’m so sorry, Eiji!”
Eiji’s laughter and Akari’s laments echoed in the kitchen after him.
Tea (finally) served, Eiji delved into the reasons for his visit.
“Did Emu tell you why I wanted to meet with you?”
“Only that you were interested in souls, and our eyecon research.”
Eiji nodded, lacing his fingers together on the table. “6 years ago, I lost someone very important to me. He wasn’t human, and his soul was bound to something called a medal.” Eiji paused to rifle through his pockets, then placed a handful of coins on the table.
No, not coins. These were much thicker and bigger than a normal coin. Takeru and Akari both leaned forward to look closer at them. “These are medals?” Akari asked, picking one up and turning it in the light.
“Those are cell medals. The Greeed, that is, what my friend was, were homunculi created through alchemy over 500 years ago. They feed off of human desires, which they manifested as those,” Eiji gestured to the medals.
Takeru picked one up too. It was heavier than he thought it would be. “And your friend was in one of these?” he asked.
“They had cell medals too, but a Greeed’s body was primarily made of core medals. Only one of them contained the Greeed’s consciousness, and…” Eiji trailed off, reaching into one of his other pockets and pulling out something that he looked solemnly at.
“This… is Ankh.”
The medal Eiji set carefully down onto the table was red instead of silver, and it was broken in half. The engraving on it looked like a bird. Takeru started to reach for it, then stopped and looked to Eiji for permission. When he nodded, Takeru scooped up the pieces with the same care Eiji had shown them.
“It’s warm,” he said.
“It usually is,” Eiji agreed. “It’s been in my pocket for a really long time, after all.”
‘What is it made of?” Akari asked.
“Hmm… Lots of things, really. In Kougami’s research, it says-”
Eiji and Akari’s voices faded in the background as Takeru studied the medal pieces, cupped carefully in his palm. Its warmth fluttered and pulsed weakly, like a dying ember. But it refused to go out. Takeru’s newfound senses had faded a little bit, but he could still sense the faint, silent anger lying almost dormant in the medal.
“Let go.”
A flash of red in his periphery, a silent voice in his mind. Takeru jerked his head up, glancing around the room.
Takeru? Are you all right?”
Eiji and Akari were both looking at him now. Takeru hesitated, glancing down at the medal pieces in his palm. It was still sputtering its weak warmth in his hand, but he could sense nothing else from it. Had he only imagined the voice? He didn’t want to get Eiji’s hopes up if it hadn’t been real. “Yes, sorry. I thought… nevermind.”
Eiji frowned at him in concern, but Akari, long used to Takeru spacing out, moved on from the subject. “We’re heading down to the lab,” she told him. “I want to take a closer look at the cell medals Eiji brought with him.”
Takeru passed Ankh’s broken fragments back to Eiji, then stood with him to follow Akari downstairs.
Akari was already in the raised lab when they made it to the bottom step. Eiji paused to take in the Monolith shrine (and Yurusen, who was napping on top of it). “What’s this?”
Takeru smiled a little sadly at it. “That’s the only gateway into the Ganma World.” And to his friends on the other side.
Eiji sat down a few feet from the water, and Takeru settled down next to him. Atop the Monolith, Yurusen cracked an eye open to peer down at both of them in annoyance for disturbing his nap before closing it again.
“Emu said you dealt with them, but that he didn’t know the exact details about them or the eyecons.”
“The Ganma were a tribe of people a long time ago, before the Great Eye granted the leader’s wish and created a world parallel to our own where his people could live safely. A huge bout of disease decimated a lot of their population, so Magistrate Edith made these using the Great Eye’s power.” Takeru held up his hand, summoning his own eyecon to his palm before handing it to Eiji.
Eiji gently took Takeru’s eyecon, turning it around in his hands. Above, Akari finished settling the cell medals under her scanners, and came back down to join them. “The eyecons are made to house a soul, so it could exist separately from the body,” she said. “With their souls safely separated from their bodies, the Ganma could be free to exist without fear of sickness or death, so long as their original body wasn’t harmed.”
Eiji looked apprehensive at the idea. “What did they do with their original bodies? They still need to eat and drink, don’t they?”
“Magister Edith had them stored in life support pods beneath the royal family’s castle. The pod took care of the bodies’ needs, which left the Ganma free to roam without fear.”
“What happens if the eyecon becomes damaged?”
“Then the soul inside will return to its original body.” If it even had a body to return to.
Eiji was quiet for some time, still toying with Takeru’s eyecon in his hands. A thought occurred to him, and his head snapped up to look at Takeru, then back down at the icon. “Takeru, do you… go in here, when you transform?” He looked alarmed. “I’m not touching your soul, am I!?”
Takeru laughed. “No, no! That’s definitely mine, but it’s empty right now. When I transform, it channels my soul, but I never leave my body. Neat, right?”
Eiji still looked unsettled, leaning over to pass Takeru’s eyecon back. “Still, you should have told me sooner! I could have dropped it, or broken it somehow!”
“These things are pretty tough,” he said, reaching back to take his eyecon. “Don’t worry, it’s been through a lot and survived it just fine!” Well, it hadn’t , at one time, but he didn’t want to worry Eiji further.
Akari shot him a look over Eiji’s shoulder, and Takeru could tell she was thinking of exactly the same thing.
As his fingers brushed Eiji’s to take back the eyecon, a spark shot up his arm and his vision clouded over. On instinct, he braced himself.
Unlike most of the times this had happened, Eiji’s memories weren’t clear. They came and went in messy flashes that Takeru could scarcely make sense of.
Fire and smoke, the earth shaking beneath his feet. A warmly lit cafe, a cheerful woman behind the counter humming as she worked. A girl in a room scattered with fabric, holding a tape measure across Eiji’s shoulders. The cafe, again; Two men and a woman, one grinning and the other two aloof, as they clustered around one of the tables.
The memories flit by even faster; The girl in the dress again, holding hands with Eiji and a man with red-blonde hair as they all walked together. The cold ocean lapping at his ankles as the blonde man snarls in Eiji’s face, his expression one of rage and despair. Eiji, falling and falling and reaching out to a red armored gauntlet falling with him.
Reaching, reaching, reaching…!
And Takeru fell back into his body again, dizzy and sick against the onslaught. His hand tightened around his eyecon, and he took it back from Eiji and fought to make sure his nausea didn't show. Only a fraction of a second had passed.
He let his eyecon dissolve again, and settled his hands into his lap, fingers clenched around each other to hide the shaking. “See? No harm done!”
Eiji smiled in relief, completely unaware of what just happened. Akari, however, met Takeru’s eyes and frowned. He knew she could tell he was lying.
While most of Takeru’s clairvoyant abilities dulled when the Great Eye disappeared, the ability to read minds through touch hadn’t. It was both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it helped Takeru to connect with the people he met, and for that he was grateful. But on the other hand, he couldn’t control when it happened. And it was a huge invasion of privacy. Nobody wanted their memories on display for others, and Takeru hated that it happened against his and their wills.
He tried not to touch people too often outside of when it was necessary, like when he was fighting.
Akari’s scanning equipment beeped, and she shot up to bound up the stairs. “Ohhh, I love when I have something new to study!’ she exclaimed.
Eiji followed her up the steps. “You know, Kougami Foundation has positions for researchers right now. If you want to study the medals with more jurisdiction, I could recommend you to Kougami.”
“Don’t pull my arm, Hino! I might just take you up on that offer!”
“I’m serious! I think Hina and Satonaka would like it if there was another girl around.”
Takeru made to follow them, mildly curious about the cell medal himself, when something red flashed in his periphery again, and he turned his head and froze.
Standing in the upper lab’s corner, next to the handrail, was a Ganma monster. It was one like nothing Takeru had ever seen before, red and feathered and watching him with a piercing golden eye.
His mind raced. Was this a rebelling Ganma? Surely Alain and Makoto would have said something if Ganma were going rogue and attacking people again, right? How did it look like this at all, anyway? With the Great Eye gone, it wouldn’t have been able-
This… wasn’t a Ganma. It wasn’t wearing a driver, for one thing. And it hadn’t moved at all since Takeru had noticed it.
And he’d seen this creature in Eiji’s memories. Was this what he thought he’d seen earlier?
An exclamation from Eiji and a laugh from Akari had the spirit turning its head sharply in their direction. Takeru looked, too.
Yurusen had moved from the top of the Monolith to the lab, and was sitting on the scanner. He was batting at the medals, sending them clanging across the floor while Eiji scrambled after them.
When Takeru looked back, the monster was gone.
Eiji originally declined to stay the night, but prolonged badgering from Takeru and the others finally convinced him.
After dinner, Takeru sat on the engawa overlooking the main courtyard, eyes on the faint purple sky as the sun set. The thin wisps of clouds glowed gold on the underside against the setting sun.
He wished his friends in the Ganma World could be here to see it. The hazy red of the Ganma World’s sky was hardly a comparison, but they had more important things to do than sit here and watch the sky with Takeru.
Feeling the vibration of steps in the wood beneath his hands, Takeru looked up to see Eiji making his way over with a sheepish grin. “Do you mind if I join you?”
“Not at all!” Takeru watched Eiji sit down beside him with a relieved sigh, then smirked. “Onari and the others can get pretty loud when they argue, huh?” Eiji winced, and Takeru laughed brightly.
“It made me feel a little nostalgic,” Eiji said quietly. He shifted, and Takeru heard the metallic clink of the medal pieces as Eiji pulled out Ankh’s shattered core from his pocket. “Ankh and I argued like that.”
The medal looked even more vibrant red in the setting sun. Takeru leaned back on his hands, and said “Will you tell me about him?”
Eiji opened his mouth, hesitated, closed it again. When Takeru tilted his head in encouragement, Eiji huffed out a laugh. “I have no idea how to even start,” he said.
“Start anywhere, even if it’s strange or silly! You’ve spent 6 years looking for a way to find him again, right?” Had Eiji ever spoken about his friend to anyone who didn’t already know him? The thought made Takeru sad.
Eiji stared at the medal pieces, took a deep breath, and started.
Once he started to talk about his friend, it was like he couldn’t stop. The words flooded from Eiji like a dam bursting. He told Takeru about how Ankh had been weakened when they’d met, and had spent most of his time possessing the body of a police officer who would have died without his interference. He told Takeru about how Ankh loved ice cream, and complained regularly about the brainfreezes he would suffer from eating it too fast. How Ankh liked to sit in high places, how Eiji had to chase him out of trees more than once.
He talked about betrayal, selfishness, of reconciliation, about reaching out for someone who had finally become real only for Ankh to slip away through his fingers like sand.
Eiji talked about Ankh for so long that the sky was dark and the stars had come out by the time he was finished.
Takeru’s heart broke for Eiji, and for Ankh too. He knew, at least a little bit, about how it felt to stand apart from everyone. How empty an existence was, where one couldn’t eat or sleep or feel the warmth of the sun or the chill of a brainfreeze. Nothing had ever tasted as good as the rice ball Onari had given him when Takeru finally lived again.
They sat in silence for a while, both absorbed in their thoughts, before Eiji spoke again.
“Sometimes… I wonder if I’m doing this all for nothing.”
When Takeru looked at him, Eiji was staring out across the yard with an expression of deep melancholy. “What do you mean?”
I mean that this is all there is of him now,” Eiji held Ankh’s broken core up in the weak starlight. “And Kougami can replicate cell medals, but core medals are something else entirely. And even if we do manage to replicate his core medals, without his consciousness…” Eiji’s shoulders slumped in defeat.
Takeru reached out to lay his hand on Eiji’s arm. When Eiji turned to look at him with forlorn eyes, Takeru said, “I don’t think it’s impossible as long as you have hope that he’s really there.” He manifested his own eyecon again, and Eiji looked at it in confusion. “This shattered once, while I was still a ghost. My soul was lost after that.”
Horror crossed Eiji’s face, but Takeru pressed on before he could interrupt. “But I’m still here now, because my friends wouldn’t give up on me. It seemed hopeless, but somehow, their hopes and wishes reached through to where I was, and I came back.”
Takeru took Eiji’s shaking hands, and folded his hands closed over the medal. As he raised his eyes back up, he noticed something over Eiji’s shoulder.
In the shadows of the engawa across the lawn, the man with blonde hair and the familiar gauntlet arm learned against a support beam with his arms crossed. When Takeru made eye contact with him, he clicked his tongue and jerked his head away, like he was annoyed he’d been caught watching them.
Refocusing his eyes before Eiji noticed his attention had strayed, Takeru smiled at him and shook Eiji’s hands in his own for emphasis. “As long as you hold on tight to that dream, I don’t think you should worry too much. I have faith you’ll see Ankh again.”