Tomari Shinnosuke frowned at the readout; there were no heavy acceleration particles registering at the location of the previous day's fight. Granted, he wasn't using the Ride Booster Set attached to Tridoron, and the equipment he had was significantly less sensitive, but there still should have been a trace of something.
"Well?" Kiriko asked over the radio. She wasn't with him in the field, but she'd brought Eiji to the office while she prepared for her return to work.
"Nothing," Shinnosuke said. "I don't understand."
"How about you?" Kiriko asked, and Shinnosuke glanced over at his field partner. Koichi Kano had declined to attend to the low-key welcome-back party the chief had decided to throw for the Special Investigation Unit in honor of its temporary reinstatement. Still, despite the less than social aspect to the man, Shinnosuke had to admit that he was turning out to work well with the other members of the unit. Kano had a good eye for detail and apparently infinite patience for his coworkers' shenanigans; the latter alone made him easy to work with.
"Nothing," Kano said. He'd picked up on how to use the particle detector with ease, not that it was particularly complex machinery. "Are you sure a heavy acceleration field was detected?"
"It wasn't," Shinnosuke said. "That's the problem."
Kano frowned at him from underneath the ridiculous helmet; it made him look even more like the revived Chase, and if Chase was going to stop wearing the purple leather all the time, Shinnosuke was going to have trouble telling the two of them apart. Chase might not have copied Kano's personality, but they were remarkably similar all the same.
"We got reports of the Roidmudes, not the heavy acceleration field," Shinnosuke clarified. "Since we didn't detect the field, we don't know how long they were here before we showed up."
Kano nodded, looking around. The former construction site had been roped off; road repairs had been scheduled for that particular day, but had been delayed by conditions in other parts of the city. The area had therefore been left cordoned off but not manned, meaning no one had been present when the Roidmudes had begun causing damage. "The question," Kano said, "is exactly what they were doing here."
"Exactly." Shinnosuke stabbed a finger toward his field partner. "What were they doing." He turned around, looking over the construction site. The street hadn't been torn up for repair, even, nothing had been started before the Roidmudes had shown up. It was considerably worse for the wear now, and the entire block was inaccessible until further notice.
As far as Shinnosuke could tell, the Roidmudes hadn't had a particular objective in mind. They hadn't even formed a pact with a human, and there had been no indication that they'd been attempting to invoke a particular emotion.
"They weren't acting without thought," he said, in response to Kano's next question. "They wanted something, I just don't know what it was."
"What, exactly, did they do?" Kano examined the battlefield, as if he were trying to figure it out, but the evidence of whatever the Roidmudes had done before the Kamen Riders had shown up was erased by the damage caused in the fight.
"They were drilling," Shinnosuke said. "Drilling patterns into the concrete. They hit power lines and a water main."
"Which have to be fixed." Kano took the helmet off and scrubbed his hands through his hair. It fell into something resembling order, which Shinnosuke vaguely resented. If he'd done that, his hair would have stood up in tufts all over his head. "Is there any imagery of the pattern?"
"Not so much." Shinnosuke sighed. "Usually it's easier to figure out what they're doing."
"If I recall the case files correctly," Kano said, "their main drive was evolution, into an advanced form."
"It was," Shinnosuke said. "Evolve into an advanced state, invoke emotion, achieve the super evolution state, permanently freeze the world." He ticked off the points on his fingers. "They needed four, for that." He paused, remembering something else. "But 108 was a little different."
"He was the time traveler?" Kano asked. "The one who merged with his past self and tried to induce the Global Freeze on his own?"
"You've done your homework," Shinnosuke said. "But none of these appear to have time traveled, and if they did, then why come to a time when there aren't any Roidmudes? No, they have another objective. I'm sure of it."
"You're the one who's the most familiar with them," Kano said.
"If you have a theory, I want to hear it," Shinnosuke told him. He meant it, no edge of sarcasm; he was out of ideas, and if Kano's fresh perspective had something, at worst it would be useless. At best, it would give them an idea of what to do next.
"I'm not sure," Kano said. "I don't think we have enough information."
"Or we have too much information," Shinnosuke muttered. "It's like they were just trying to get our attention." The idea made more sense than he wanted it to, but there was never anything simple in what the Roidmudes did.
"Revenge?" Kano offered. "For having killed them all the first time?"
"It's never that easy," Shinnosuke said dourly, packing up his equipment. "Let's get back to headquarters; there's nothing else we're going to find here."