The bell above the entrance chimed, startling Shotaro. He didn't remember unlocking the door that morning. Come to think of it, he didn't remember locking it the night before. He thought briefly that it was lucky that no one had wandered into the office while he and Philip were asleep before it occurred to him that he would never know. He put the thought out of his mind and jogged up the stairs.

"I'm so sorry, we're not actually open," he started, but the person in the shop turned to smile at him and the words dried up. "Miss Izumi," he said.

"Mr. Hidari." She greeted him politely.

"Would you like some coffee?" Shotaro asked, remembering his manners after an unforgivable lapse.

The adorable Hina – he had to remember not to call her that – smiled and shook her head. "I heard you're the one looking for Eiji," she said.

"Ye-es," Shotaro said, tilting his head to one side. "I don't suppose you know where he is."

Hina looked at the floor. "I feel like I should have started asking questions sooner," she said. It wasn't uncommon, when someone disappeared, for the people left behind to feel guilty; particularly when the people in question were separated by as much distance as Hina had been from Eiji. Telling her as much, however, wouldn't help; Shotaro had found, through trial and error, that carefully returning to a previous topic of conversation helped provide at least momentary distraction. In this case, he actually had a pertinent question to ask.

"Miss Izumi," he said again, this time to get her attention. "What can I do for you?"

"I don't know if these will be helpful." Hina had jumped, just slightly, when he said her name, and then started digging through her purse. She pulled out a thin stack of envelopes, most of them marked as airmail. "None of them are even close to when Eiji disappeared."

Shotaro took the stack of envelopes, just glancing over them at first. Eiji had written Hina physical letters, none of them dated but each presumably still in its individual envelope. "Hino sent these to you?" he asked, just to be sure.

"Mostly for the first few months, and then he just stopped. He'd send texts instead," Hina said. "Once in a while, he'd call."

"Thank you," Shotaro said, and meant it.

"Do you really think they'll help?" Hina asked.

"I think that if I understand what Hino'd been doing and what frame of mind he might have been in, it might help me figure out where he decided to go," Shotaro said.

"He wanted Ankh back," Hina said softly.

"Ankh," Shotaro said, trying to place the name. "The blond?" He vaguely remembered him, from the time travel mess, but he'd been gone the next time Shotaro had seen Hino. "Why did I think that was your brother?"

"Ah," Hina said. "It's a long story."

It turned out to be a shorter story than Shotaro was expecting; Ankh the monster had become Ankh the friend, and sacrificed himself during the fight that had led to Eiji leaving Japan again. "Hino thinks if he can repair the Core Medal, that he can get Ankh back," Shotaro said finally.

"Oh, he was sure of it," Hina said. "Ankh came back from the future, just for a little bit."

Shotaro closed his mouth with a snap. He was absolutely not going to ask about time travel. "And his research for the Kougami Foundation," he said instead. "He's trying to figure out how to put the Cores back together."

Hina nodded. "My brother says to tell you that Eiji hasn't had any contact with his parents," she said after a moment.

"Recently?" Shotaro asked, mentally shifting gears.

"Since before he met us," Hina said. "Right after… you know. When they brought him back to Japan."

"Right," Shotaro muttered; by this time, he was familiar with the incident that had kick-started the civil war Eiji had tried to end so many months later. Before he could say anything else, Hina looked at her watch and exclaimed that she was going to be late, and Shotaro politely showed her to the door and thanked her for her help, and then he locked the door firmly behind her and leaned on it.

The thing was, he couldn't blame Eiji for either part of it; if someone had told him when Philip had vanished that there might be a way to get him back, Shotaro wouldn't have stopped until he'd found it or died in the attempt. Shotaro very much hoped that he wasn't going to find out that Eiji had followed Ankh instead of figuring out how to bring him back. Knowing what Eiji had been searching for and knowing how close he himself had been to a similar path, it was a few moments before Shotaro could make himself go back downstairs, to where Philip was waiting.

Hina's letters he left alone, except for checking the dates; he didn't want to open them before he had to. It seemed like a gross invasion of privacy, even though Hina had handed them to him. He returned to the file instead, looking for the next step in Eiji's quest to bring back his lost friend.

"I didn't see him," Shotaro said, looking at another plane ticket several minutes later. It corresponded with the date of the insanity that had involved far too many people wearing far too many colors.

"I feel," Philip said, "That there is perhaps an inordinate amount of cross-generational conflicts."

"Uh huh," Shotaro said absently. He wasn't entirely sure the event in question had actually happened; they'd all been pulled into a massive fight against villains with whom Shotaro wasn't particularly familiar. Oh, he'd seen bits and pieces of Shocker during the time travel debacle, but the vast majority of what he remembered from this particular fight was like a fever dream (pirate ships in the sky, giant fighting robots, being temporarily dead), and when it had been over, he'd been all too happy to just collect Philip and leave.

If Philip hadn't remembered it, too, Shotaro would have put it down to a nightmare. Given that Philip did remember it, Shotaro was tempted to label it a mass hallucination. But there was Eiji's plane ticket, the date lining up with what Shotaro kept trying not to think about.

"Did you say you didn't see Hino?" Philip said, blinking and actually looking over at Shotaro.

"During that thing, with the thing," Shotaro said. "And the other thing."

Philip just kept looking at him.

"You know what I'm talking about," Shotaro said, stabbing a finger in Philip's general direction. "Apparently Hino was there, but I'm not the one who told him about it." Come to think of it, he had a vague memory of seeing several of Hino's suits fighting simultaneously, which was one of the reasons he kept leaning towards ascribing the entire thing to the realm of the imagined.

"February is the worst month," Philip said. "Where did he go from Japan this time?"

"Brazil," Shotaro said, tying off the blue thread and labeling it. "He took the remains of the Core Medals with him."

"I thought he had a box full of those things." Philip reached past Shotaro and plucked the printout of the relevant email out of the pile. Shotaro felt this was monumentally unfair, as Philip could literally have read it in his head.

"He did," Shotaro said. "Does. He does. He has a box full of them." He didn't look at Philip trying and failing to be sympathetic. He didn't want to tell Philip what Hina had told him; he thought it might color Philip's analysis of the situation. That is exactly the type of information that you were trying to get, in order to more closely analyze the situation, he reminded himself, but he still didn't want to tell Philip.

"Of course," Philip murmured.

Two of the letters had been dated before Eiji's flight to Brazil, and one was post-marked three days after Eiji's arrival there. Reluctantly, Shotaro pulled them out of their envelopes and began reading. None of them said much, other than friendly chatter about the weather and the people he'd met, how some things were so different from Japan, and how some things were the same. They sounded perfectly normal, not at all like a man on a quest to resurrect the dead.

"Who's Marvelous?" Philip said, chin resting on Shotaro's shoulder as soon as he finished talking.

"Ah," Shotaro said. That was the only thing out of place in the first few letters; the previous two were already tacked onto the map in the appropriate places. The third letter, the one from Brazil, was mostly more of the same, until the very end.

I don't know what Marvelous did to them, Eiji had written. I saw them change, and the Gokaigers used them like Ranger Keys, but Marvelous still had the – the Rider Keys, I guess, when he gave me the Cores back. If Joe contacts you, Hina, please. Please tell me. I don't have any other way to get in touch with any of them, and I have to know what he did. It might help me fix

The letter ended abruptly, without punctuation or a signature at the bottom. Shotaro frowned at it. "He wouldn't have kept looking, if this Marvelous had been able to answer his questions," he said, finally.

"Probably not," Philip agreed. "Fix what?"

Shotaro took a deep breath and told him.

"That makes a lot more sense," Philip said, completely skating over the emotional ramifications. "For what he was doing in Brazil. Look at this."

The whiteboard shimmered and crystallized into thousands of lines of text, barely separated by the suggestion of pages, one on top of the other, interspersed with graphs representing things that meant absolutely nothing to Shotaro. He looked at Philip expectantly.

"Here," Philip said, and pointed to one of the pages. It was written in something that wasn't Japanese and didn't resemble English, which meant that Shotaro had zero chance of figuring out its significance. "That's the base substance, the Core Medals. These samples were subjected to exhaustive analysis, but nothing indicated where the samples had come from or why they were so important."

"He was analyzing the core medals?"

Philip tilted a hand back and forth in a sort-of gesture. "I don't know how much Hino was doing, but he's listed as co-author on some of the papers. He was only there for five months, though, and there's a paper with his name on it that was published last week."

"You're sure he's not there now," Shotaro said.

"Positive." Philip narrowed his eyes. "There's probably some sort of agreement that I could find explaining –"

"No, that's okay." Shotaro held up a hand to forestall his partner. "What else were they doing with the Core Medals?"

Philip closed his eyes and the whiteboard blurred. Shotaro looked away; the way the images moved around on it made him vaguely dizzy and nauseous. "Analysis of the chemical composition, analysis of what kind of radiation they emitted –"

"Radiation?" Shotaro said sharply.

"Everything emits some sort of energy," Philip said. "It's not dangerous. Probably."

"That's not reassuring at all," Shotaro said.

"Radiation," Philip continued, ignoring him, "and they tried to break some of the intact ones. Eiji had a full set, but none of them were breakable. The initial set? It was different than the orange Medals. There's a list of differences in radiation emitted from the broken Medals and the intact ones, but Eiji was reluctant to let those out of his sight, and that limited what could be done. No one was able to explain the difference in emissions."

"Philip," Shotaro said, because the gist of what he was hearing was that Eiji hadn't learned anything helpful in Brazil.

"There's a note in one of his reports about purple Cores," Philip said, and frowned. "They're never mentioned again, and I can't find them in any of the rest of the Foundation's data."

Shotaro made a note to ask someone about purple Cores, and then looked at his own handwriting. "This gets weirder every year," he muttered under his breath.

"This is when he disappeared the first time," Philip said.

"I thought he went radio silent a couple times before that." Shotaro risked looking at the board, which was now blank. He leaned against his temporary desk.

"That was for a couple of weeks at a time," Philp said. "This was for two months. The only indication the Foundation had that he was still alive was the two reports that still went in on time. Both of them consisted of the sentence nothing to report, but the Foundation couldn't tell where they came from."

"Let me guess," Shotaro said. "You know exactly where they came from."

"I don't know why you think you have to ask," Philip said. "Hino asked for introductions to a number of people, some of whom were reputable and some of whom weren't."

"Where?" Shotaro asked patiently.

"Ah, the Foundation flew him to New Delhi," Philip said.

"India?" Shotaro put a pin the map and labeled it. "What was he doing there?"

"Your guess is as good as mine," Philip said, which was such a blatant lie that Shotaro shook his head. "He was there for the entire time the Foundation couldn't find him. They did try," he added.

"Of course they did," Shotaro said.

"New phone in October," Shotaro said. "He sent that number to a lot of people, actually, the Foundation was billed for a lengthy video call from the middle of the Gobi desert to Japan."

"The desert." Shotaro put another pin in the map. "Where did he go from there?"

As far as Philip could tell, Eiji had wandered around aimlessly; his reports were the same, and he barely touched the account the Foundation had set up. The video call from the desert was the last actual phone call for that particular line. Shotaro checked the number; it was the same one that he had as the most current, with no voice mail set up – the one he'd gotten from Goto, not Gentaro. "There's a plane ticket back to Japan, but it doesn't look like there was any contact with the Foundation while he was here."

"Hold on," Shotaro said, sitting up straight. "This is what Gentaro was talking about."

"Fourze," Philip said.

"He wanted me to forward Eiji's contact information so he could thank him for something," Shotaro said. "Eiji gave him some help with something."

"Probably Rider related, then, right?" Philip said.

"Could have called me, too," Shotaro said. He was absolutely not sulking about it.

"Are you jealous?" Philip asked.

"What? No." Shotaro chewed on his bottom lip. "So Gentaro called Eiji for help, Eiji showed up, and then – how long was he here? Don't tell me. He left as soon as he got here."

"Two days," Philip said. "Less than 48 hours."

"So does it bother you," Shotaro asked, "that apparently Gentaro could reach Eiji using the number he didn't have when he needed his help in December, but couldn't get in touch with him six months later? Now? In May? When Eiji allegedly has the same number?"

Philip opened his mouth and closed it. "Time travel?" he said, finally.

"I don't even know why I ask," Shotaro said, and put the issue aside. It was possible that Gentaro hadn't used a phone, or that Eiji had gotten in touch with him instead of the other way around, or something else ridiculous related to whatever Rider business Gentaro had gotten tangled up in that time. "So after wandering around aimlessly for over four months, Eiji goes back to Japan for two days and then goes where?"

"Um." Philip wiggled his fingers as though he were paging through something. "China."

Shotaro looked at the date he'd just written on the pin demarcating Beijing, and at the date of Eiji's most recent visit to Japan. "I'm going to make some guesses, and you tell me how right I am."

"Go for it," Philip said.

"Hino handed over a box of reconstituted Core Medals in March," he said. "That's where we started with this whole thing." He waved a hand at the map. "He spent between December and March in Beijing, which is where they put the broken Medals back together. But." Shotaro paused. "Clearly they didn't work the way they were supposed to, because if they had, we wouldn't be here having this conversation. He already would have repaired the Medal he thinks will bring his friend back. Ankh."

"This is why you're a detective," Philip said.

"Hard-boiled," Shotaro said.

"Half-boiled," Philip muttered.

"You have no room to talk."

"He tested the reconstituted Medals by putting them into his belt," Philip said, changing the subject.

"He what?" Shotaro blinked. "That's reckless. He had no idea if they'd been repaired."

"Spectroscopic analysis wasn't conducted until after he tested them in the belt," Philip said. "Though the first three attempts only resulted in error messages."

"First three? How many times did he-"

"Five," Philip said. "Post-test analysis led to different reconstitution methods for each medal." He gestured, and a report materialized on the whiteboard.

"Philip," Shotaro said. "I can't actually read Chinese." He could parse together some of it, though, based on the symbols. "Does that say electric shock?"

"That was the fourth test." Philip pointed at one line. "No ill effects on Hino, apart from minor arrhythmia that sorted itself out."

"You said there were five," Shotaro said. "Stubborn bastard that Hino is."

"He managed a transformation with the fifth reconstituted Medal," Philip said. "For less than a minute. He was unconscious for three days afterwards. That was when he flew back to Japan."

"And that's where we came in," Shotaro said. "That was when he went to Denmark, and Norway, and then across Russia. After every attempt to resurrect his partner failed."

"It looks like he was trying to get back to Japan without the Foundation knowing." Philip leaned across Shotaro and traced the red string across Russia. "Can you think of another reason for him to travel this slowly, across Russia?" he asked, when Shotaro didn't answer.

"I can't," Shotaro admitted. "But why not tell anyone?"

Philip shrugged. "He was planning something," he said. "Don't look at me like that, Shotaro, that's not what I said. I think he tried to enter the country by boat."

"If he didn't want anyone to know unless it succeeded," Shotaro said, rubbing his chin. "But why not just buy a plane ticket? Why sail?"

"Not enough funds left to buy a plane ticket?" Philip guessed. "And if he accessed the Foundation account to buy a ticket, there would have been a paper trail."

"None of this is reasonable," Shotaro said, glaring at the map as though if he looked at it long enough it would tell him whether the story he and Philip were concocting was correct.

"That's why I told you you weren't going to like the results of my analysis," Philip said softly, and then when Shotaro tilted his head questioningly, Philip clarified. "78% probability of Hino Eiji's location being the Sea of Japan. It's not an easy trip to make illegally."

"I don't accept that," Shotaro said, resolutely pushing away the fact that he'd had the same thought, when Hina had told him what Eiji was trying to do. "I don't." He wasn't sure if he was trying to convince Philip, or himself.