"The patient is presenting symptoms of second-stage amatoxin poisoning," Johnny C. shouted, leading a party of doctors wheeling a stretcher down a sterile, white, fluorescent-lit hallway. He glanced down, looking at Steve's unconscious body. He had thrown up twice on the drive over, and fell unconscious the second he hit the stretcher. The color was draining from his sweat-slick face. "We'll need a tox-screen to confirm it, but it's already metabolizing at an accelerated rate, so you're going to need to get him under hemodialysis and hemoperfusion, but if that doesn't work then we're going to need to be ready for a liver transplant. Do you have an on-call toxicologist?"

"That's me," said a bearded doctor on the other side of the stretcher. "Are you sure it's amatoxin?"

"I saw it happen," said Johnny.

"Christ…" said the doctor. "I'll get him on NAC and do a full gastric decontamination."

"He's been plenty decontaminated enough," said Johnny. "Get him on oxygen. He didn't eat it, he inhaled it."

"He inhaled amatoxin?" said the doctor. "How the hell did that happen?"

"You get him well and I'll let you write a paper on it!" said Johnny as the stretcher burst through a pair of double doors and sped away down the hall, leaving him standing there alone as the doors slammed shut. "…get well, Steve."

"Johnny!" Briggs came running up behind him, flanked by Jimenez and Jean-Michele, the latter still wearing her black leathers. "We came as soon as we heard. How's the kid doing?"

"We just got him here," said Johnny, thumbing back over his shoulder. "The locals are looking after him." He glanced in Jean-Michele's direction. "Is she…"

"I'll tell you everything in due time," Jean-Michele said.

"…what happened to your accent?" asked Johnny.

"In. Due. Time," she said, narrowing her ice-blue eyes.

Nikki leaned out to the side of the group, pointing to de Bouchard and mouthing "She's a rider!"

Johnny blinked. "I'm… sorry, I don't think I know you?"

"Oh, hey dude," said Nikki, giving a half-wave. "Nikki Rivers, I'm kind of…" she looked at the other two women and shrugged. "I think I'm the intern."

"Don't call yourself an intern," said Briggs.

"How about sidekick?" she asked. "Can I be your sidekick?"

"I'm her sidekick," said Jimenez, as Briggs buried her face in her hand. "You'd have to be my sidekick."

"If anything, she's my sidekick," said Jean-Michele. "I found her first."

"…I'm sorry, but could all of you go back to the waiting room and bring back some goddamn adults!" Johnny shouted, his fists clenched so tightly that his knuckles were turning white. "My friend is in there with a poison that's tearing him apart on a cellular level and you want to talk about your superhero fantasies?"

The others fell silent. Even Jean-Michele managed to look ashamed. Briggs stepped forward and put her hand on Johnny's shoulder, leading him away.

"Come on, Doc… let's get some coffee," she said.

"I don't even like coffee…" he grumbled.

"No, but you need some coffee," said Briggs.


The coffee helped. Johnny hated every bitter drop of it, but it gave him some other horrible experience to focus on.

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather be in there with Steve?" said Briggs, who was on her third cup. The coffee in the hospital cafeteria was like petroleum mixed with chalk dust, but she was long past caring about the taste. "See what they're doing?"

"This isn't my hospital," said Johnny. "I can't even go near him without a six-foot stack of conflicts. And they pile so much medical ethics into us about conflicts of interest and…" he sighed and took another hateful sip. "The… the locals will take care of him for me."

"You two have been friends a long time, hmm?" asked Briggs.

"Since I was 8," Johnny said, grinning. "My parents moved down to Georgia when I was just a kid. Dad was a medic, he got posted to Fort Benning. There were a lot of black kids, lot of white kids, but I was the only Hawaiian kid in my grade. And I had skipped a grade, so I had that against me too. Some kids tried to mess with me the first day I got there, but Steve was there too, and he didn't like bullies." He took a long drink. "They kicked the crap out of both of us." Briggs cracked a smile at that. "Everyone got detention, and I shared my game boy with Steve."

"He's a good kid," said Briggs.

"I kept skipping grades… I was in college by 16, med school by 18. No matter where I was going, Steve and I would meet up every weekend," he sighed. "I didn't have many other friends. I don't think he did either."

"That surprises me," said Briggs. "Even I'm warming up to the guy."

"That's just how it goes some times," said Johnny. "Helen, I'm worried. Not just about the poison. I'm not a shrink, but… you've seen how he acts, right?"

"You mean how he gets… different?" said Briggs, ignoring the use of her first name.

"It's not just different," Johnny said, nervously rubbing his temple. "He's like five different people, each of them color-coded." He took a sip of coffee, spilling most of it. "I think he's disassociating."

Briggs looked at him for a second. "I'm not a shrink either, Johnny."

"Sorry, sorry," Johnny said. "Dissociative Identity Disorder. Sometimes, when a person undergoes a serious trauma, their mental state becomes so fragile that parts of it start to break off like… like a Kit Kat bar."

"Oh, you mean a split personality?"

"It's nothing like a split personality!" said Johnny. "…okay, it's a little like a split personality. But it's not like… actual personalities. It's like… I've just turned into a bug monster and I've got another bug monster who wants to kill me. I can't deal with this and stay sane. So part of me goes to sleep, but the part of me that can deal with this stays awake. And it's all my anger and my rage, nothing else, but it's what I need to get through it. And then later I need to be quick on my feet, so another part breaks off. Then I need to be cold and calculating, and then I need to protect somebody, and all these parts just keep breaking off. But the original, the part that's me, it's just a tiny sliver of glass made of all the parts that couldn't handle it in a crisis," Johnny paused to let out a long breath. "And he just had to beat somebody to death."

Briggs was silent, her lips pursed. Johnny crumpled his paper cup of coffee in his hands.

"Long-term, I think that's going to do more damage than the poison."


I'd like to respond to a few reviews.

Commander M: A lot of the stuff you mention is things that will be revealed or touched on later in the series, or in future installments if I wind up doing them. I do try to take all the suggestions and considerations that people give me seriously, all I can say for now is wait and see, and that I hope you enjoy what I do. I don't want to promise that I will or won't do something, because I know that plans change and I am very fickle.

KirbyfanNeox: I had a feeling that this would be controversial, but I probably should talk about it. First, thank you for pointing out that the first series happened in 1971 and not 1973, that was a mistake on my part and I changed the last chapter accordingly.

Second, the short answer is that I changed the character's name to show that this isn't the same person in the same universe, and that Ichigo Takeshi is a slightly different person from Hongo Takeshi due to things like changes in the backstory.

The long answer is that I still think of this as a hypothetical adaptation of the Kamen Rider series, and that as the nature of adaptations, some things would change. The broad strokes of the universe are still there, it's still Kamen Riders fighting the forces of SHOCKER, and if something happened in the original, it probably happened in this version too, but I wanted leeway to change things if I needed to, for the sake of the story I'm telling.

For example, I needed to have Taki show up and act a certain way, but he might not be acting the way that Kazuya Taki would in the series. By changing his name to Ken'ichiro Taki, I'm trying to say that this is a different character, but he had the same role in the overall story as the original. The same with Takeshi Ichigo, his role in the series and as Kamen Rider 1 is largely unchanged, but some of the details are different.

Then again, I may be entirely overthinking it, this may be a bigger deal than I thought, and maybe it's a silly thing to change. What do you think, audience?

Whatever you think, or whatever I decide to do, I just want to say that I'm not going to be making changes to the Showa series just for the sake of making changes. I can't promise much about the future, but I can promise that. Thank you all for reading, and for giving me your feedback.