Kamen Rider Whisp

A calm breeze stirs the air as a young woman watches a butterfly flit between flowers of a quiet garden with a pensive expression. The sunlight glances off of her long, straight dark hair and plays along the aged walls, casting deep shadows in the grooves of the temple roof. She sighs as the butterfly continues choosing flowers from the famed gardens, wishing that her worries could be borne away as easily as the winds could lift the insect’s wings. Interrupting her thoughts, a man in robes exits the temple.

“Himari, have you been here all day?” he asks with fatherly concern in his voice, “I’m sure… didn’t you have work today?”

“No work!” the young woman replies quickly, “I was just watching the butterflies, Hiraku. I’m actually waiting for Kichirou and Aoi. They wanted to take me out for my birthday, to get my mind off of things.”

“You have good friends,” the monk comments warmly, “I’m glad you’ve agreed to go out with them. I’m sure your mother doesn’t want you to spend all your time worrying about her.”

Himari turns and gives the man a warm but worried half-smile. “We’ll find her. The detectives promised they’d do their best, and the time that’s passed won’t burn out my hope so easily!” By the end of her sentence, her smile has warmed to a genuine grin.

Before Hiraku can react, the sound of footsteps startles both of them and they turn to see Himari’s friends walking up the temple path.

“It’s super unusual!” Aoi can be heard speaking in the quick, excited tone of someone who has more stories to tell than they have time to tell them, “social media is just exploding with unexplained stories! Unexplainable! People claiming their car just fell in half, like it was cut! Authorities investigating a boat-swing ride at an amusement park that spontaneously flew into a building. People claiming they were harassed by an invisible assailant all over town!” She excitedly points to each story on her phone as she tells them to Kichirou, who looks a bit like he is drowning under her speech.

“Aoi, please, you can’t believe everything you read online! Half of these claims are directly blaming ghosts - which don’t even exist.” he replies, desperately trying to get out of discussing it further.

“They definitely could. Himari! What do you think? Do ghosts exist?” Aoi calls as they approach the step Himari had been sitting on.

“Himari, please don’t encourage her…” Kichirou begs, a little pathetically. His shoulders slump a little as Himari raises a hand to her chin to think about the question.

“I… don’t know!” she replies, a mischievous glint in her eyes. “I think I’d believe in them if I saw one. A butterfly flew in my window yesterday afternoon, I’d like to think it was dad coming to visit!” She smiles at that and gets up from the step, brushing off her skirt and straightening her favorite jacket.

“You didn’t tell me this, Himari.” Hiraku interjects softly, joining the friends’ conversation. “You were so young when Hayate passed, it’s no surprise he would visit you in such a troubling time.”

Himari turns to reply, but the sound of a man screaming interrupts her as the whole group turns to see the mailman running up the path. Himari rushes down the steps to try to see what has him so distressed. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“S-something just! My bike! In half! Whoosh!” the mailman splutters. “Right outside the gate, it lifted me in the air! Nothing there!”

“What?” Himari asks, confused.

Aoi pipes up behind Himari, “Ghost attack! Score one, social media!”

Kichirou gives Aoi a stern look, “That isn’t funny! He could have been seriously hurt!”

The mailman fumbles at his bag. “I have a package for you, Himari. Here.” He hands an unassuming brown paper package to her with shaking hands. Himari takes the package and thanks him, not entirely sure that she’d have the same dedication to any of the temporary jobs she had been doing lately.

The mailman excuses himself, saying that after his experience with the bike, he only wants to finish his route quickly and get back home. Once he has gone, Himari looks to her friends. “So, ghosts or not, we’re still going to the museum today… right?”

There is a moment of silence, only broken by the sound of Aoi starting to giggle. “You only want to go because you heard they had a special exhibit on Tomoe Gozen this month!”

“Don’t be mean!” Kichirou chides, “Himari is allowed to have a favorite person from history!”

Himari sighs, brings her hands together in front of her, and thumbs the little piece of decorated metal in the bracelet she had been given as a child. “She was a warrior worth a thousand, someone whose life burned so brightly, its light shone on through the centuries. I want to live like that, that’s why I’m interested in her. That’s why I wear this piece of her armor.” Himari shakes her coat away from her wrist, showing her friends the bracelet.

“We’ve heard this all before, Himari!” Aoi groans. “Just open your mail and we’ll go!”

“Ah, right!” Himari looks at the package in her hands. “That’s odd, there’s no return address. I guess it’s good that it arrived safely?” As she pulls the package open, a small card slides out into her hand. When she reads it, she makes a small startled noise before looking up at her friends. “It’s from my mother!”

“Your mother?!” all three of her friends exclaim at once.

“It just says that she’s alright and she’s sorry that she can’t be here for my birthday. Nothing else.” Himari replies, her voice flat with shock. “This is definitely her handwriting.”

“What did she send you? Is there any other cl-” Aoi begins to ask, but a whooshing sound splits the air, the package splitting in half and spilling on the ground as Himari falls backwards, yelping.

On the ground, Himari sees the contents of the package her mother sent laying next to her. Several bunched-up newspapers and a strange white ball-shaped object. Not recognizing the item as anything she was aware of, she reaches for it only to be shocked badly by it. “Ow, ow! What is this thing?” She asks, cautiously reaching for it again, and grabbing it when she realizes there is no second zap in store. “Why would my mother send me this?”

“Such power,” an unearthly voice interrupts Himari’s thoughts as a roughly humanoid monster weilding a massive sword fades into her view. “This is exactly what we need - a shame it was sent to this girl. How troublesome.”

Himari shrieks and scoots back, grasping the item her mother had sent to her chest and scrambling for a way to get to her feet. “M-MONSTER!” She shouts, attempting to throw a rock from the ground at the being, only to see it pass harmlessly through the creature’s body. “G-ghost?!” she exclaims next, finally getting to her feet.

“Are you okay, Himari? Now isn’t the time to prank us,” Kichirou says to his stricken friend, looking past the monster and straight at Himari.

“Don’t you see it? You need to run!” Himari shrieks, jumping out of the way of a the swing of the monster’s blade, which lops the heads off of several of the Temple’s flowering plants before burying itself in the ground.

“I don’t know how you can see me, girl, but maybe your friend needs to learn the hard way that I’m here.” The creature swings around, lifting its sword to attack Kichirou.

“No!” Himari shouts, leaping onto her friend to force him clear of the attack.

“What’s happening?!” Aoi asks, taking a step back, “Himari, this isn’t funny.”

Hiraku runs over to help Himari and Kichirou up, asking the entire way over if they are alright.

The sword-wielding monster points his blade at Himari. “Determined to be a hero, girl..? Give me that Eyecon you’re holding, and I’ll leave. Day saved.”

“Eyecon?” Himari whispers, realizing that the monster wants the item her mother sent to her. If it wants this then in that case… Himari slips past the monster, running at full force into the forest along the temple. “If you want this, come get it, ghost!” she shouts, grabbing a branch as she looks over her shoulder to make sure that the creature follows her. I’m not sure what I can do against this thing, but I need to get it away from the others!

“So be it…” The monster follows after her, paying no heed to the trees in its path. When it catches up to her, the monster takes a reckless swing at her with its sword, which she barely manages to bat away with the branch she carried with her. “Last chance girl, give me the Eyecon!”

“I… I need this! It’s the only clue I have for finding my mother!” Himari shouts back, clutching the Eyecon tightly.

“So be it. You leave me no choice.” The monster’s sword whips through the air, cutting through Himari’s branch as if it were nothing and slicing from her shoulder straight across her chest, below the collar bone. She gasps in pain, throwing her head back a moment and collapsing to her knees, then falling face-first onto the dirt.

Am I going to die? She thinks, her breathing short, her mind foggy with pain. This can’t be happening. I only wanted to make sure the others were safe. My life… I can’t burn out like this.

“Himari? Himari!” She hears her friends drawing nearer, hears them shouting as they see her on the ground. They pick her up, and she knows they are all crying then, nothing.

Himari wakes up, to her surprise, completely underwater. Her feet find the rocky bottom of the pool as the muffled sound of turbulent water fills her ears, and she pushes her way to the surface, gasping for air. The turbulent sound is clearer now as she realizes she is at the foot of a cascading waterfall. Quickly, her hands go across her shoulder and chest. The wound she had just received was nowhere to be found, her clothing in tact, aside from being completely soaked. “Am I dead?” she asks the empty air as she pulls herself to the shoreline. “Is this the next-”

“Himari Nakano,” a man’s voice echoes from everywhere at once, causing her to startle and look around her at the unfamiliar woods. She can see no-one around her, only the empty clearing and a rustling wall of bamboo stalks.

She gathers her courage, standing up from the rocks. “Who’s there? How do you know my name?” Silence reigns in the clearing for a moment, save for the sound of the falls.

“I know a lot about you, Nakano.” The voice replies, still sounding from everywhere at once. “I know that you just lost your life in a fight with a Geyest, and that you carry an Eyecon with you.”

“Geyest? Eyecon?” Himari asks quietly, then louder, “Is that what that ghost-monster that attacked me is, a Geyest?”

“It is,” the voice replies. “That Eyecon, where is it?”

Something familiar about the voice makes her feel uneasy, but she produces the Eyecon anyway, fishing it out of her soaked coat pocket. Once the object is in front of her in her hand, it begins to glow, startling her a bit as it transforms from its dull white with mechanical lines into a more polished item. The body of the Eyecon resolved to a black color with a subtle metallic shine, the protrusions to either side resolving to be an immovable node on the left side and what looks to be a switch of the same size on the right. The front-facing side of the device turning glassy-clear and revealing a pure white hemisphere slightly below the surface, with a small circular opening showing a flat, grey patterned surface a little deeper into the device. A glistening cyan and black label appears on the top, showing two eyes, like the upper wings of a butterfly or leaves. The label read “WATASHI” in white capital letters.

“Interesting,” the voice continues. “You fled into the woods in the hope of protecting your friends. The Geyest are still out there, and they will continue to threaten the safety of everyone if they go unopposed. Their aim is to bring about the 15 Luminary Eyecons - the very spirits of great figures of your world’s history. If you can prevent them from doing so, you protect the lives of all the people of your world. If you gather all 15 Eyecons for yourself, you may be able to use their power to return to life.”

Himari gives a startled look around the clearing. “That’s possible? I could come back to life? But how? I’ve already lost. The Geyest killed me!”

“Take up the responsibility of becoming Kamen Rider Whisp, and defeat the Geyest as a ghost. Will you accept?” the voice asks.

Himari only pauses a moment. “I do, but I need to know how this works. What do I need to do?”

“Good.” as the voice speaks, an orange glow shines around Himari’s waist, materializing into an unusually bulky belt with a large handle protruding towards her right side. The device, coated in some kind of folded-looking clear material, has a single eye at the front. The strap of the belt is a bright orange. Its sudden appearance nearly causes her to stumble back into the pool. “To become Whisp, simply press the switch on the Eyecon, load it into the belt, and pull and push the handle. The Watashi Eyecon now houses your soul, and will allow you to persist in the living world. Use the eye symbol to seal an Eyecon.”

“What abou-” Himari starts to ask, but a force presses against her chest and knocks her back into the pool. She feels as if she is rapidly sinking, closing her eyes until the feeling changes. She finds herself standing back in the woods near the temple. Almost exactly as she realizes this, she hears her friends crying out her name.

“Himari? What happened to Himari?!” Aoi calls, Kichirou and Hiraku look as if they had been holding something, and paw at the air a moment before joining her in shouting.

“I’m here, guys!” Himari tries to get their attention, reaching out her hand to realize that she can see through it slightly, and that little blue flecks of flame dance around her body. As her friends continue to panic, she realizes they cannot see her. Aoi panics and begins to run back towards the temple, causing the other two to run after her. “I guess I really am a ghost…” she says out loud, lowering her hand back to her side with a sinking feeling in her stomach.

“You’re back?” the familiar voice of the Sword Geyest asks behind her, rudely. “I thought I had eliminated you.”

Himari spins around, remembering her conversation in the clearing. “I… I am back. If you thought you could get away with killing me, you’re wrong. I won’t burn out so easily!”

The Geyest lowers its blade at her as she pulls out the Eyecon, remembering the instruction the voice had given her. Press the switch, load it into the belt, pull and push.

When she does so, she is suddenly clad in black armor with blue and orange fine lined details. The blue patterns remind her a little of DNA. She looks up to notice what looks like a floating coat with eyes heading towards her. Not understanding what’s happening, she first dodges out of the way, only for the coat to connect with her from behind, settling comfortably over the armor and manifesting a bright cyan faceplate with the same eyes as the label on the Eyecon. Her belt calls out, “Kaigan: Watashi! Let’s go! Kakugo! Eien no gōsuto!”

“What are you?” The Geyest asks, charging in for an attack.

Some unknowable instinct tells her that if she wills it to be so, she can summon a weapon to defend herself. “I am,” a single-edged blade materializes from her belt and she raises it to parry away the attack, “Kamen Rider Whisp!”

The first moments of the battle are uneasy, with Whisp landing a few attacks, but taking a few heavy hits that land her on her backside. Ow, ow. Okay, I guess ghosts can still feel pain. Good to know. Himari gets up, and as the battle goes on she becomes increasingly more confident in her abilities, her mood lightening with each swing as the tide of the fight turns in her favor. Her feet leave the ground and with glee, she realizes she can fly. Maybe being a ghost for a while isn’t such a bad thing, after all.

With a powerful swing of her blade, she pushes the Geyest back far enough away from her that she can take a moment to think about what she should do next. I need to wrap this up. Maybe if I just… She puts a hand to the handle of her belt and pulls it out, hoping for a good result. To cover her uncertainty, she addresses her enemy. “I may be a ghost, but I will protect the lives of those around me. Right now, that means defeating you.”

As a response to her comment, the Geyest charges at her. She pushes the handle back in and is rewarded by the device calling out “Watashi Omega Drive!” Cyan energy bursts forth from her and gathers at her foot. Reading the situation, she leaps into the air and kicks into the enemy. The force of the kick stops the Geyest’s charge and sends it backwards, causing the monster to explode in a dramatic ball of fire.

Seeing the area clear, Whisp looks around, and begins to jump and cheer. “I did it? I did it! I won!” She pulls the Eyecon from her belt, dismissing the belt and the transformation as she jumps and spins around. “I won!” She looks around again, more apprehensively. “I’ve got to get back to the temple, the others are definitely worried about me.” She turns and sprints through the woods, not noticing a more metallic-looking, small Eyecon still laying on the forest floor.

Himari finds her friends outside the temple arguing about what to do next. Aoi pushes for an emergency call, which Kichirou reminds her would sound insane. Hiraku stands silent with a haggard look on his face. Himari’s heart drops seeing her friends so worried. She runs up to them, trying to get their attention. “I’m here, everyone. I’m right here!”

When they don’t react, she sighs. “You still can’t see me. It couldn’t be that easy could it…” Himari places a hand on Aoi and Hiraku’s shoulders. “It’s okay, guys, I’ll show you I haven’t burned out yet somehow.” She looks at her friends and can’t help but smile, knowing in her heart that somehow, she’d come back to them.

Aoi and Hiraku jump at that moment. “Himari?! HIMARI!” all three of her friends shout, suddenly aware of her presence. Himari finds herself awash in hugs and questions, all of her friends wondering where she went and expressing their relief that she was alright.

Himari bites her lip. “Actually, I’m a-”

Her friends don’t hear the rest of her sentence, returning to being unable to see her and falling into the space she had just occupied. Thinking quickly, she realizes that both times she felt sad, she vanished. I’ve seen enough cartoons to guess this, it’s my emotions! Right? She focuses on being a bit more confident.

“Himari, what’s going on?” Kichirou asks, sounding very worn out.

“I…” She pauses, trying to focus on keeping from being sad, “I’m a ghost now.”

“A ghost, so you d-died?!” Aoi yelps, grabbing the sleeve of Himari’s coat.

“Himari, this isn’t a joke, this isn’t funny!” Kichirou protests, grabbing her other sleeve. Hiraku only looks on with an unreadable expression.

“I’m serious!” Himari protests, “I really am a ghost!” Frustrated, she lets herself disappear to get out of their grasp and reappears a short distance away from her friends. “You guys can believe what you want. I’m going… to go sit down.” She lets herself vanish again, leaving her friends to hash out what they thought was happening to her among themselves.

After leaving her little blue boots and putting on her inside slippers, she walks quietly to the room she had been allowed after her mother’s disappearance. Sitting on her bed, she pulls the Watashi Eyecon out of her pocket. Is this really me? My soul? She flops down on the bed. “The thing the belt said when I transformed, ‘The eternal ghost’... I don’t like the sound of that, didn’t whoever that was in the forest say that I could come back to life?” in spite of herself, she smiles. “It doesn’t matter right now. The important thing is I’m not gone yet, and I’m some kind of… ghost superhero now! I should definitely try out my powers.”

She moves her hands by her waist, calling the belt back to her. Ghost Driver. She isn’t sure how she knows that, but it sounds right. Good enough for now. I should have a cool pose that I do when I transform.

While Himari plays with her newfound abilities, the metallic Eyecon rises from the ground in the forest...