oomori_hill | Month 2: Enter the Meme King

Entry tags:

mingle post

Month 2: Enter the Meme King

In a secluded, shadowy, disused location, the select few of a newly formed organization come to meet.... What dark and--

"Oh for gods sake, do you have to narrate every damned time?"

"Look, I'm trying to build the atmosphere here! How are we to be proper about this if we don't even go that far?"

"Who cares about being proper!" a third figure, noticeably smaller than the first interrupted. "I wanna know who's gonna be fighting this week!"

"Ug, seriously? We don't even have everyone here yet!"

"So???"

"He does have a point, you know..."

"Oh, don't you start too."

"Hey, I'm just saying..."

"Fight! Fight! Fight!"

"All right, all right! Eesh! Make your report already!"

There was the distinct sound of glasses being adjusted, a glint of light reflecting in the darkened room. "Currently over 25 individuals of note have been recorded. Not all of them are of significance, however, as a few... supporting individuals seem to have been connected as well. Of these, the Rider franchise seems to be the most represented, with Ultraman coming in second. More research is needed to determine how to create connections in a more targeted way before phase two of our operation can begin."

"And I can fight them!!" the younger voice piped in excitedly.

A deep sigh from the glassed figure answered. "After they fight each other first," he corrected. "We've been over this..."

"Ha! You just think they need to be softened up first, don't you?! Don't you believe in my power??!"

"... don't make me answer that."

"Hey!!"

"And that's enough of that, I'd think... Fade to black, everybody!"

"...drama queen."

Any Displaced individual prone to visions, premonitions or other plot sensing type skills may have had a variation on the above scene in a dream, vision or just felt like someone was watching them. Even those without a plot speaking skill may start getting a strange feeling of being watched when they're out in public....

Not that it will be foremost on their mind very long, as suddenly, every single TV screen or similar nearby flashes white, before a short clip begins to play:

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Eiji gave Tachibana a quick smile and a wave when he saw him, then goes back to checking his phone.

"Maybe. Something about it sounds familiar, and the logo seems weirdly like...deja vu, I guess. I'm trying to see if maybe someone saved the video and uploaded it online."

He looked over to Tachibana. "What do you think?"

"That it's a load of bullshit that someone's made a damned game using Kamen Riders," Tachibana returned, scowling up at the TV screen (that was now the usual generic talk-news-whatever show that always seemed to be playing on those things.) "No way in hell is that from my timeline, Kotaro promised we'd have final say over anything made from his book, damnit."

That was not exactly the reaction that Eiji was expecting. He stared at Tachibana in shock for a moment before laughing.

"Sorry. I'm not laughing at you, just...I think you just answered my question about how honest I can be with you."

Tachibana blinked a few times as Eiji laughed, looking... more confused than affronted, but still a bit miffed.

"...the hell is that supposed to mean?"

Eiji held out his hand. "Kamen Rider OOO."

That might explain things, right?

Tachibana blinked once more before accepting the hand. "Kamen Rider Garren, Sakuya Tachibana," he introduced, tone a bit formal despite his lingering agitation at the situation.

Eiji brightens up considerably. "Oh, so you're the Tachibana I was talking to on the message board! I'm Eiji, by the way."

One more moment of delayed blinking before Tachibana's posture relaxed, a faint hint of a smile finally reaching his expression as he made the connection. "That would be me, yeah," he nodded, far more relaxed.

Tachibana wasn't the only one feeling more relaxed. Eiji felt a lot better knowing all of this too.

"So a friend of yours wrote about you?"

"You could say that, yeah," Tachibana nodded. "Kotaro..." he paused a moment, looking thoughtful. "He became a member of our team, really. Was Kenzaki's support when I... wasn't." He looked away with a bit of awkward guilt for a moment before shaking it off and continuing.

"He had gotten involved because he had been doing research to write the book in the first place. Got a little more than he bargained for, I think," he added with a faint chuckle. "But he didn't run from it. That that idiot was willing to get so involved even with nothing to protect him..." he trailed off with a small, fond smile, shaking his head.

"Sounds like someone I'd like to meet," Eiji admitted. "We could take turns getting yelled at for being reckless."

He looked back at his phone, still failing to find an upload or screencap.

"I don't think it's something from him, though. I think it might be related to something I know."

A small, fond chuckle escaped at that. "Haven't met a Rider or anyone working with them who wasn't a reckless idiot in one way or another," he pointed out, before his expression faded back to a more serious one.

"Something you know?" he prompted, eyebrow raising.

"Dr. Emu Hojo--I mentioned him before?" Eiji asked. "He's also a Rider, using some kind of videogame-based system. I didn't get the chance to ask a lot of questions, but I wonder if this is connected to it."

"...a video game based system?" Tachibana repeated, eyebrow raising further before he looked up at the screen that the advert had played on. That was still just that same news show.

With a faint frown, he turned back to Eiji. "Is he also displaced?"

"Emu's not here, at least not as far as I know," Eiji admitted. "But it's possible this man might be from my world."

"..You and Emu were from the same one?" Tachibana blinked. "Not that you had been pulled into his world or something like this before?"

...did he need to start making a chart. He might. Maybe he'd use one of the conference room whiteboards to try and sort this all out...

Eiji nodded. "I don't fight as much now, but I come and help out every so often. There's been a few different Riders that came after me. All with really different powers. And there's at least two other worlds with Riders of their own--Build's and Gaim's."

"...that one world saw enough danger that more than one generation of Riders was called on..." Tachibana reflected, a worried frown tugging at his expression.

It was almost expected that there would be multiple worlds with Riders. Parallel worlds that had developed on similar enough paths would of course run into variations on threats that would necessitate Riders.

...and if there were one world that was far more prone to misfortune that multiple groups of Riders had been called... could that be the source of all of this?

Eiji hadn't really thought about it quite like that before. Mostly because things usually seemed to be confined to specific cities or parts of the Tokyo area that didn't end up nearly as widespread until toward the end.

But at the same time, Tachibana seemed...distracted. Like his mind had gone a lot farther with the thought than Eiji's had.

"Is everything okay?"

"I've been taking energy readings of areas of overlap -- places that hold significance to the people who've been displaced, that people from other timelines and world have been able to find without guidance. Compared to their surroundings, these places have elevated energy readings, similar to how the locations the BOARD has had its headquarters in the past also have residual heightened energy signatures from repeated transformations and similar activity."

He paused, lips pressing together a moment as he tried to figure the best way to word the brewing hypothesis. ~~Giving Eiji a moment to ask any question of the seemingly random side track~~

Eiji is very used to random sidetracks that divert away from answering a pointed question. He does it all the time himself, when he doesn't want to tell anyone he's not okay.

So he tries to run with it, although it's just so MUCH of a tangent that he blinks, not really understanding.

"Okay?"

For Tachibana, changing the subject was a fairly standard response to most situations. That and just leaving. But for once, his seemingly random topic switch was not avoidance, but an attempt to connect the scattered points of data he'd been staring at since this whole mess stated.

"With a world that's seen more than one set of Riders be pressed into action, I can't help but wonder if a similar excessive energy signature might have been left behind... and if that could be a complication, if not a possible root of this odd displacement."

It's still going over Eiji's head, and he stares on in confusion.

"I...don't think I understand?"

Tachibana hesitated a moment, looking over. "...you don't measure the energy signatures that your Systems produce when you transform?"

The thought that Eiji might not be as up to his elbows in the technological details of how his system worked as he had been somehow had not yet occurred to him. ~~never mind that even Kenzaki would still have been mostly lost here, never mind the other two of his fellow Riders from his home universe~~

"The Kougami Foundation probably does, but I don't exactly specialize in that..."

Technically, he didn't specialize in anything in particular. He just happened to be doing mostly archeological freelance for the last seven years or so, and before that, he waited tables and dressed in costumes.

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