"That's just the thing. I don't remember it. You see..." Matt leaned close to whisper. "I think it's going to happen later on to me. Something's going down, and I'm going to be sent to Earth's past to help you fight that guy."

"What?" Hyuuma said, confused now. "You mean time travel? Well... we know its possible, but... eh. We'll see."

Hyuuma was about to say more when he heard a beeping and a vibration within the pocket of his vest. He pulled out a small, diamond-shaped gold pager, and read the five-digit code on it. "Huh," he grunted, "Looks like Taiga called a meeting. I gotta go. I'll mention what you said to the others, though, and we'll talk about it later."

"Mmmm. All right, then. Catch up with me later and we'll hammer things out." Matt turned away and walked off, back toward the J-Ark. At the very least, he could start preparing his mind for what was to come.

Hyuuma nodded to Matt and turned away towards the Kushinada. It wasn't long before he reached the briefing room for the meeting. Papillon and Entouji filed in afterwards, as well as Kazuo. Each took their respective seats, with Papillon and Entouji sitting next to each other. J stood by one of the walls, preferring to stand (and unable to sit with the way his armor was designed).

Renais was the next to enter the briefing room, looking over with a slight frown. The frown vanished, however, when the cyborg woman laid eyes on J, and the hint of a smile replaced her countenance as she quickly made her way over Soldato-J.

After everyone had assembled, Taiga stood once more. Hands on table, his eyes scanned across the room, surveying his comrades. "Welcome. I've gathered you all here to discuss our interdimensional guest, Matt."

"Does this have to do with the incident this morning?" Hyuuma asked, looking at Taiga with one open eye as he leaned back in his chair.

"Incident?" J asked, looking up slightly. He had not been filled in on the details of the encounter.

"This morning, a scaffolding collapsed while repairs were being done on HyoRyu and EnRyu," Papillon explained. "Somehow, Matt produced a violet-colored barrier and protected the crewmembers who were underneath it. Due to the color, crewmembers jumped to conclusions and figured Matt to be one of the New Machine Species, Zonuda."

"I see," J said, relaxing as much as he ever did.

Mikoto's small frown widened a bit. She still remembered her brief time as the first of the New Machine Species-spurred by the maturation of a seed planted in her by EI-01, or Pasder, she was transformed into Zounda, and wreaked havoc on GGG and Tokyo before she was able to lower her defenses from within, giving GaoGaiGar the edge it needed to defeat her giant robot form. Afterwards, Guy could only stop her by performing Purification for the first time, turning them both into Evoulders as a result.

Though she was cured of Zounda's influence...the name still put her at edge.

"This meeting doesn't exactly have to do with that," Taiga said, "but Matt's barrier is probably due to something else you all should know about." He turned toward Mikoto. "Mikoto?"

She nodded, and looked to the rest of them. "Do you remember that scream we all heard at the same time? And the chill that we all felt?"

"Vividly!" Liger chimed in. "It was one of the most horrible things I had ever felt!"

The people gathered in the room nodded.

"As I recall," Kazuo said, "The collective feeling caused an accident while we were gathering supplies. And the meteor fell shortly afterwards, didn't it?"

"Correct," Mikoto replied. "...that scream came from Matt."

"It did?" Liger asked.

"Yes. When Papllion and I interacted with Matt's mind to look for information about the portal he mentioned...I saw some memories that I wasn't supposed to see." Her face became stern. "That scream came from him. Before he came to this world...Matt was a creature that threatened space and time itself."

"How is that possible?" Renais said, frowning at the Evoulder. Not to doubt her abilities, but she couldn't really see Matt as capable of that. "He can barely walk in that armor he's wearing."

"When he first gained the armor, he was consumed by his anger and became extremely powerful," Mikoto explained. "Now it seems he's back to normal, but he's still wearing the armor for some reason."

"Do you know how it got on him, then?" Liger probed, leaning foward. Now that Mikoto had the answers, he had to know everything.

Mikoto glanced down at the table. "All I can tell is that he was in a battle with a powerful entity. There were other people with him. There was also a girl. Somehow, she died. I saw him holding her corpse, and then they were both engulfed in green fire. After that I saw him with the armor...but his face was covered. It made him seem completely different."

"What else did you see?" J pressed, curious about his former opponent.

Mikoto shook her head. "Not much. I saw him manipulating a rift in space, and saw him fighting the entity, but the link I had cut itself off before I could see more."

Liger rested his chin on his fingers. "So, if this is true, then how did Matt lose all his power? And how did he end up on this world? And why does he still have the armor?"

"I believe we need to speak with Matt about this," Taiga said. "I know he told you all that he didn't remember anything about where the armor came from or what it's for, but there could be the possibility that he's hiding information from us."

"Well, before I got here, Matt came up to me and said he talked to Tomoro about being filled in on what happened back then," Hyuuma mentioned, "Back when we fought EI-OMEGA."

J nodded. "I directed him to speak to Tomoro when he could not remember the events of when he and I battled beneath Tokyo. With luck, Tomoro may have scanned him and came up with something. It would be wise to speak to him about this as well."

"I knew that was him!" Liger laughed. "This just keeps getting more interesting, doesn't it?"

"Indeed it does, Doctor Liger." Taiga's serious glance set in, as it always did before a decisive order. "Which is why we need to get to the bottom of this."

Mikoto spoke back up. "Chief...this is probably a sensitive subject for Matt. We shouldn't just go in there and accuse him of anything. I know he feels a lot of shame over what he's done."

"Very well." Taiga folded his arms. "The one he trusts most out of all of us will speak with him privately on the matter."

The group in entirety nodded.

"So what do we do about his apparent memory loss?" J asked, folding his arms. "Guy theorizes that the armor may be holding back his memories."

Liger cracked a smile, gestured with his pointer finger. "Or he knows everything. From the first day we met him, I suspected he had a greater secret, but as Mikoto said, he probably attempted to keep this information from us due to the regret he felt."

"In any case, we have to speak with him," Guy said, glancing toward Papllion. "And I think Papllion is the best person to do so."

The Amazonian woman looked up at Guy with a slightly startled expression on her face. "Me?" she asked, slightly confused.

"Matt's taken quite a liking to you, Papllion," Liger said. "He's clearly at ease when you're around. Probably because you were the first to speak to him."

Slowly, Papillon nodded. "Okay," she said quietly, "But I don't know if he'll trust me. He told me he wasn't okay when I asked him earlier, after the scanning procedure, but he refused to talk about it with me."

"Still, you're our best chance of finding out what we need to know," Guy said.

"Especially since reading his mind tends to cause problems," Liger added.

"Okay," Papillon said, nodding.

"I just remembered something," Hyuuma said suddenly, sitting up in his chair. "Something Matt mentioned before I went to the meeting."

"What's that?" Taiga asked his old friend.

"He said... well," Hyuuma hesitated, thinking of the best way of phrasing it. "He said that the reason Tomoro filled him in because he thinks it hasn't happened yet. To him, at any rate."

"But...that doesn't make any sense!" Mikoto interjected. "We fought alongside him against EI-OMEGA!"

Liger's grin just widened. "I see...perhaps our friend also dabbles in time travel as well..."

"What are you saying, Uncle?" Guy asked.

The small scientist brandished his finger again. "We know that Matt was apparently a dimensional traveller. If we remember him coming to our world, but he doesn't, he either forgot the event-which I doubt-or he simply hasn't gone there yet, in his current reality. What if, in the future, he actually travels back to the past of this dimension, to aid us in the battle against EI-OMEGA?" A shrug. "Of course, with what little I actually know about his travels, this is all hypothesis."

"That would make sense," Soldato-J said. He turned to his rival. "You said that you found something else with Matt. A glass shard related to his armor. What is it?"

"We named it the Sky Shard," Guy replied. "It gives off energy signatures similar to the ones Matt's armor gives off."

"Also, when we analyzed it, we found it to hold a wealth of data," Liger added. "More data than you can possibly think of...and we didn't even finish scanning it before the computer exploded from the output!"

"Matt, so far, is the only one to have physically touched the Sky Shard," Papillon continued, "And it caused injury both times, despite the armor he wears. The second time he touched it, he saw various images in his mind before he was forced to discard it."

"Images?" J said, slightly disconcerted. "What kind of images?"

"He mentioned seeing a man, a girl, and a gathering of snakes," Renais filled in for him, crossing her arms. "And then he saw a portal."

"A portal?"

"A portal to another world, we're guessing," Liger said. "One that could take us home."

"But then Matt saw an image of a claw reaching from it," Mikoto added. "So we don't know what that could mean."

"I see. I shall advise Tomoro to detect incoming dimensional anomalies then. If this claw belongs to an enemy, I would advise that our armors be rebuilt soon," J said, meaning the reconstruction of his own armor, and that of Guy's ID Armor. "It would be unwise to be ill-prepared should this portal appear."