"It looks like the Foundation hired Hino in September of 2011," Philip said. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning on the wall under his whiteboard. Despite how quiet his voice was, Shotaro had no trouble hearing him.

"Wasn't there some sort of natural disaster in Tokyo at the time?" Shotaro said. He seemed to recall hearing something along those lines; a number of skyscrapers had been severely damaged, and there had been a significant death toll.

"The tornado?" Philip said, uninterested despite how out of the ordinary a tornado was for the region.

"Sure. The tornado. We'll go with that." A tornado that had flung all its debris out to sea somewhere, so that the remains of the missing had never been found. If that didn't have the hallmarks of a Rider battle all over hit, Shotaro didn't know what did.

"Hino stopped whatever it was," Philip reminded him.

"Right." Shotaro tapped his map and stuck a pin with the date in it in Tokyo. "So the Foundation hired him."

"For research?" Philip sounded dubious, and Shotaro couldn't blame him. Research did not seem to be one of Eiji's admittedly eclectic skills. "What kind of research?"

"Biotech," Shotaro said slowly. Apparently Eiji really had been hired by the Foundation for biotechnological research. The file the Foundation had sent had a significant amount of detail blacked out, and most of it wasn't accessible by Philip either. When he'd asked, Philip had looked at him as though he were asking for information that didn't exist.

"Hino Eiji," Philip said flatly, as if they hadn't covered this earlier. "Biotechnology."

"Don't look at me." Shotaro tacked the relevant document onto the map. "It looks like they sent him to an archaeological dig a few weeks later." He could feel the skeptical expression on Philip's face from clear across the room. "A medieval sight," he added. "See what you can dig up about a site near Haslach im Kinzigtal."

"I see what you did there," Philip said in his best your-jokes-are-not-funny voice, but he obliged. "It's a pet project for the Foundation's CEO," he said. "Apparently one of his ancestors is from the region. The site was first uncovered in the late 90s, and he's been funding it ever since. Not a lot, just enough to keep it running. It looks like they sent occasional shipments of, uh, cultural artifacts to Japan."

"The German government didn't object?"

"Do you have any idea how many similar sites there are?" Philip sounded almost exasperated. "You can't walk down the street without tripping over something historical."

Shotaro was fairly certain Philip was quoting someone else. "Okay, so he had stuff sent here. What kind of artifacts?"

"Uh, that's hard to – the customs documents aren't really that specific." Philip frowned. "Wait, there was a shipment in September – no, wait, that was 2010. Went to the museum that exploded."

"Was there perhaps a connection?" Shotaro said. It was a rhetorical question. That was right about the time he'd first met Eiji, when the then-new Rider had chased what Shotaro now knew was a Core Medal across a rooftop and defeated one of Shotaro's opponents. He'd gone looking for him afterwards, to thank him, but he hadn't seen him again for months, not until the time travel disaster. Shotaro didn't want to think about the time travel disaster; it gave him a headache. He'd gotten Eiji's contact information out of it, that was the only positive part of the entire mess. "So he went to Germany, to an archaeological dig that may or may not have been connected to Kamen Rider OOO, after being hired to do biotech research." He paused. "It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud."

Philip didn't dignify that with a response. Shotaro wasn't entirely sure Philip wasn't napping.

Intuition chose that particular moment to club Shotaro over the head. "Reconstituted Cores," he said. "The Core Medals were broken. It wasn't a biological system after all. It was biotech, like the Gaia Memory. They came from Germany in the first place." He paused. "Shotaro, what you're trying to tell yourself is that someone created a biotechnological Kamen Rider transformation system in medieval Germany."

He'd heard weirder things, to be fair.

"Running theory, then." Shotaro scribbled some notes on the paper tacked to Tokyo regarding Eiji's hiring. "So Eiji – or Kougami – thought he could learn something by going to the archaeological site."

Shotaro searched the stacks of paper for anything relevant, but all he came up with was reports sent back to the Kougami Foundation with an increasing list of Core Medals. He duly noted that they did not say reconstituted; in fact, the first report distinctly noted that Eiji had found them, and had said something about a wormhole and time travel.

"Not again," Shotaro muttered. He didn't want to know. The Core Medals hadn't been broken, they'd been scattered? "Then why were you trying to reconstitute – oh, fine." He glared at the sparse reports. "I'm just going to assume half of them broke, and half of them were lost, and then I don't have to think about paradoxes."

The paper might as well have been mocking him. Shotaro tacked it onto the map, stringing red thread between Tokyo and Eiji's multiple confirmed locations in Germany. There was a lot of contact between Eiji and the Foundation, particularly compared to a year and a half later; Eiji had rambled in his emails to Satonaka, telling her that he went running daily and mentioning a few times that found a medal almost every time he picked a new route. Shotaro wanted to know how artifacts that had allegedly been lost in Japan were showing up on German roadsides, but no explanation was forthcoming.

One email from Kougami caught Shotaro's eye.

Eiji:

You're resonating with the medals! Splendid! I knew you'd find something you wanted. Keep searching, and don't give up hope even if it doesn't seem like you're making progress.

It was unsigned.

"It doesn't sound like he found what he was looking for," Philip said.

"Hang on." Shotaro checked the date of Eiji's next recorded trip. "This was me."

"What was you?" Philip stretched, but didn't cross the floor.

"Remember the incident with Foundation X and the Seeds of Life from the Universe?" The incident in question hadn't involved Hino until it was halfway over; despite having apparently been in Japan for a couple of days before meeting up with Shotaro, it had taken Hino a while to get in touch with him. He'd said something about having some business to take care of, and Shotaro hadn't pushed. He'd also been the one who'd said that he knew the Kamen Rider likely to be involved with Foundation X's partner in crime, and the one who had introduced him to Shotaro.

"Oh," Philip said. "That was when we met Fourze. Gentaro. I told you you two were similar."

"Something was off about Hino," Shotaro said. "He was quiet."

"That wasn't quiet," Philip said. "No part of that was quiet. They blew up a space shuttle."

"I didn't know when I asked him for help that he'd be flying in from Germany." Shotaro ignored Philip's commentary and added blue string from Frankfurt back to Japan and a sticky note reading SOLU.

"Weren't you annoyed that he didn't stick around long enough to say goodbye?" Philip observed neutrally.

"Well, I was," Shotaro said, looking at another one-way plane ticket. "No, wait, he left for Egypt and couldn't take five minutes to say, Nice to see you, Shotaro? I'm still annoyed." More blue string went on the map, this time from Tokyo to Cairo.

"He was in Africa in December of 2011?" Philip asked, all the neutrality gone from his voice.

"Looks like it, why?" There was nothing in the stack of papers except a note that Eiji had gotten a new phone and that the number had changed near the end of December; Satonaka had pinged the phone's GPS location and it had shown up somewhere in the less inhabited parts of Sudan. She'd pinged it several times over the following month, and as far as Shotaro could tell, Eiji had just been wandering around the African continent.

"There are a couple things in the news," Philip said. "That was right after I, um, got back and I was trying to catch up on what I missed."

Shotaro remembered Philip's resurrection better than he wanted to, but the salient point Philip was trying to make here was all the time he'd spent reading newspapers. Shotaro had had to remind him to sleep, and they'd had more than one argument about what Philip's data-generated body did and didn't need. "What was in the news?" he asked.

"Here."

A projection blinked to life on the blank whiteboard behind Philip; the headlines were loud and colorful, and the only actual photograph was so blurry that it could have been anything. "You said news, not tabloids," Shotaro said, but he paced close enough to the board to read it anyway.

The article was an account of a minor civil war interrupted by an unidentified lunatic in a flying suit, one who'd changed appearances rapidly and used highly advanced technology to destroy all the weapons being used in the war in question. At least, that was the gist of what Shotaro extrapolated; what the article actually said was a lot of nonsense about alien invasions and dictator states and forced nonviolence. The individual in question had vanished shortly after the hostilities had ceased, but the truce hadn't lasted long. Within a few weeks, conflict had resumed in the area.

Shotaro shook his head. "So Hino tried to stop a war," he said. The descriptions of the individual's advanced weaponry matched what Shotaro had seen Eiji do as a Kamen Rider.

"Not successfully," Philip said. "The area is still classified as being in a period of civil unrest."

"Don't tell Hino," Shotaro said, only half joking. "Did you say a couple of things?"

"Here's the other one."

The second news article hadn't been specifically published in a tabloid, but it was an opinion piece that purported to describe an event experienced by the author under the title To The Man Who Saved My Life: Thank You. It was dated within the first week of February. The date tugged at Shotaro's memory until he looked over his notes; it was right after Date had said he'd seen Eiji on an Italian street corner. The article itself was written in English, but Philip had included a helpful line-by-line Japanese translation, presumably for Shotaro's benefit.

I don't expect you to believe a word of this, it started, but it's all true. I'm publishing my account of what happened because I need to thank the man who saved my life and vanished without every saying goodbye.

"That's becoming a theme," Shotaro observed.

Not to be cliché, but it started on a dark and stormy night, just off the southern coast of Sicily. I had rented a boat for the day, but the weather had changed without warning. I'd been swept up in a current and didn't know where I was, and my radio wasn't working. I had strobe lamps at either end of the boat and every reason to believe that I would be able to contact someone on the radio when the storm let up; none of the waves seemed big enough to cause damage to my boat, so I started out just waiting.

Then I heard a thump on the deck, almost like a very large bird. I went out to check, more out of boredom than anything else. What I found on my deck was not a bird; it was a man. He was mostly dry, although as I stood there staring at him, the rain slowly drenched him. He was lying on the deck as though he had fallen out of the sky.

I don't think I stood there that long, staring on shock, before going to check to see if he was either alive or dangerous. Before I got farther than a few steps, he sat up and scrambled backwards. Something metallic fell off of him, and he grabbed it with an expression I can only describe as panic. He ran his fingers over it and then shoved it into one of what would turn out to be many pockets.

This was still all before he acknowledged that I was there, much less that he was on my boat.

He reached inside another pocket, and the panic melted away into relief. Then he seemed to see me, and got to his feet. The boat, while in no danger of capsizing, was none too steady, and neither was he as he slowly made his way across the deck with both hands clearly visible.

I spoke to him in Italian; he frowned and shook his head. He said something to me in what I later learned was Arabic. We ran through a few sort-of local languages before settling on English as the language we had the most of in common; his English was better than his Spanish, and my Japanese and German are as nonexistent as my Arabic and his French.

"Is this going anywhere?" Shotaro asked, looking up. "There's nothing here that points to this as being Hino, much less anything particularly weird."

"Keep going," said Philip.

The man didn't want to tell me his name, just kept repeating that he was sorry and he'd be going as soon as he could. I thought at the time that something was seriously wrong, since we were on a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean in a storm. I was right, but not for the reasons I thought I was.

Not long after Mystery Man fell onto my deck, we saw a ship. And I don't mean it was just any sort of ship, it was huge and old-fashioned. It was built out of wood, and it didn't look like it should be floating. At first I didn't think that it was; I thought we'd drifted up to a shipwreck. Then we got closer, and I realized that not only was it floating, it wasn't actually made of wood. The image of a wooden galleon was superimposed over something shiny and metallic.

The ship floated closer to us, actual lanterns hung from the railings, nothing electric at all that I could see, and also no one on board. I thought for a moment it was going to run my boat over, but then it just stopped and a ladder came over the side. I still couldn't see anyone, but Mystery Man was staring at it with horror. He said, very clearly, "Ittai nokotteta." Later I found out it means, "There's one left." (One what? Doll, human remains, statue, android, something like that. Something human-shaped that isn't human, or isn't human any more. That's what that word means.)

I moved toward the ladder. Mystery Man stepped between me and it, but for some reason I needed to see what was on that ship. I had to know. To this day, I will swear that it was playing some sort of music, and although I couldn't sing the tune now, if I hear even a few beats of it again, I know I'll recognize it. I slipped around him and put my hand on the ladder. I was on the deck of the boat almost before I realized it, and there was something or someone standing in front of me.

It was dark blue, like the deepest ocean on a sunny day, fading out to turquoise at the edges of its fantastically shaped limbs. Its hair was the green of algae, drifting around its pure white face. I don't mean white in the sense that it had pale Caucasian skin. I mean white, like paper, or something growing underground. It was calling me.

Behind it, I could see that the deck of the ship was piled high with pale spheres, almost like eggs. They were covered in gauzy webbing, untouched by the now-pouring rain. I walked toward the figure on the deck, and then Mystery Man tackled me from behind. He sent me skidding across the deck, until I landed hard against something and had the air knocked out of me. When I could breathe again, Mystery Man was gone and in his place was someone wearing dark armor and a mask. It was fighting with the blue figure on the desk.

I still wanted to go towards it, but that desire was mostly overwhelmed by a sense of horror; why on earth had I wanted to go near that thing? The spheres around me now looked dank and unhealthy, instead of pale and pure, and if I looked closely enough, I could see a pretty young woman inside each one of them. I kept low to the deck and tried to move around the fight; the armor had changed colors, and Mystery Man seemed to be defeating Sea Creature, but I didn't want to stick around for the end of it.

Just as I got to the front of the ship, I heard a horrible crunch and felt the ship shudder. I looked over the railing just in time to see my boat disappear below the waves. I was now trapped. I was tempted to leap overboard and swim for it, but I stupidly wasn't wearing a life vest, and I still had no idea where I was. I made myself as small as possible and tried to stay out of the way.

Mystery Man's suit was all red, now, and some kind of aura flared out behind it. It reminded me strongly of a peacock spreading its tail, except this peacock rained flames down on the sea creature and the boat. The sea creature – and I do not exaggerate in the slightest – screamed and exploded, and then the boat caught fire. Mystery Man looked around at the eggs, reached out one hand, and let it fall heavily to his side. Then he shook his head slightly and looked around again until he saw me. I was frozen, not knowing if I should jump. He pulled me off the boat and then we were airborne.

You see why it sounds like I'm either lying or crazy.

The ship burned below us, but I could see the lights of a harbor not far away, and that was where Mystery Man headed. It wasn't the town I'd set out from, but it was on the island of Sicily. Mystery Man landed us on the beach, just as the rain stopped, and set me down. The clouds thinned and vanished, the sun just breaking over the horizon, and the armor he'd been wearing – black, edged in red – melted away. He put something metallic in his pocket and smiled at me. Then he passed out.

The rest of the article described the aftermath of the author's experience; Shotaro skimmed through it. She'd called the authorities, requested an ambulance, and reported the boat missing. The paramedics had taken Eiji to the nearest hospital, but he'd vanished the moment he was left alone; the rest was irrelevant. Shotaro put another pin in the map and studied the winding red thread tracing a route that went across three continents.

"So after going to Germany to an archaeological dig in connection with biotechnical research on his own transformation system, he makes a side trip to Japan because I called him, and then just leaves again, after which he tries to stop an African civil war, spends some time wandering around, ends up in Italy somehow, and then takes out some sort of monster off the coast of Sicily," Shotaro said. "Right. Because all of that sounds perfectly reasonable."

"He's your friend," Philip said.