« Time anchor ID 9537 has returned from space-time coordinates 48°51′12″ N, 2°20′55″ E. Welcome back, Dr. Romero Turo. Hope you had a safe trip.» the by now familiar voice of Porygon 568 welcomed him back to his time as he stepped out of the time machine, the Pokémon briefly zipping around him for a quick scan. There it stopped for a second and clacked its beak, puffing up its virtual feathers.
« Analysis of body language, pupil dilation and breathing pattern indicate heightened emotional state. Is medical assistance required?» it asked, causing Turo to blink and actually look at the Pokémon, caught by surprise. First time it had said anything else outside of the ordinary procedure.
« What...? No, everything's fine. » he answered, before stopping by the door to look at the Porygon with a touch of amusement.
« Were you worried about me? Do you also ask the others how they are doing? »
Porygon 568 paused for a moment, then puffed up its feathers again with a little spark of electricity surrounding it, eyes flashing yellow.
« ... it is in my interest to ensure that users of the time-machine remain in peak physical and psychological condition. That is all.» it answered, then turned around and decompiled itself into code, disappearing inside the console of the time machine with a last beep that somehow managed to sound annoyed.
Now alone, Turo made his way towards the teleporters. It was almost dawn; he still had to use the night slots for his jumps, and that was starting to mess up his day and night cycle.
Thing is, Porygon 568 hadn't been wrong. His last visit with Sada had been... something. He hadn't expected her to offer to make clothes for him... and especially not to pull out a measurement tape (were they already used? Or had she literally come up with the idea herself?) and insist on taking his measurements right then and there.
Her approach had been very... hands-on, so to speak. He wasn't used to it; it wasn't exactly necessary to measure for clothes anymore, or even try them on before buying for that matter. They were either one-size-fits-all, automatically adapting to your body shape or, in the very rare occasion where you actually wanted something custom made, you just got a couple of pictures taken from different perspectives and the tailoring software would just automatically calculate everything.
Turo hadn't expected her to get so close to him, completely ignoring his personal space when she had gotten distracted by examining his suit from up close.
The way her eyes had started to gleam while she pondered the problem in front of her, so lost in her own little world of questions and hypotheses to not even notice what she was doing, it just...
She was just so bright. And that had... frustrated him terribly. Almost angered him.
It wasn't fair. There she was, one of who knows how many people with brilliant minds and the potential to change history... born in the completely wrong era.
Too early. Way too early.
It wasn't fair, he thought again while entering his apartment.
Sada had that spark in her, that drive to never stop asking questions, to want to understand the world around her, even when she barely had any tools at her disposal, even while lacking the words to articulate those questions.
It wasn't fair... how much the thought of her being both so close, yet so impossibly far away hurt him.
He almost angrily got out of his clothes and stepped into the shower, welcoming the cold water hitting him. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the shower glass, taking deep breaths.
What was he even trying to accomplish, here? Sure, he had his nice little project going. But that's exactly what it was: a project. A job. Something that had to produce results with a definite deadline. His deadline still wasn't set in stone - he had the little advantage of being the "new guy that still has to get used to the job", so they were a bit more lenient in expecting actual results from him. Honestly, just that one initial successful jump, even if accidental, would already look good on his CV and, worst case, would even pass as the only "actual" result of his research.
Once his project had ended, he would have to choose a new objective. Even if he decided to specialize in that time period, like some of his colleagues did - Ortega seemed to prefer contemporary history, only going to the last 500 years or so - ... there were literally centuries to explore. Entire continents in different time periods to examine. He couldn't just keep visiting that exact same spot in time.
So that meant that his visits to Sada had a hard time limit. A finite number.
And he had absolutely no idea what to do once that number would reach zero.
Turo flinched and opened his eyes when he realized that the water had turned from cold to scalding in the meantime, getting quickly out of the shower.
« ... what am I even supposed to write in that stupid report right now? » he asked nobody in particular once he had gotten into bed, pinching the base of his nose.
Miraidon just growled and nuzzled his other hand, not sure how to comfort him. He patted the empty space by his side on the bed and the Pokemon jumped up on it, curling up in a semicircle all around him. The dragon's hide was smooth and hard, its metallic shine reflecting the first rays of sunshine that were coming in from the window. He darkened the window with a wave of his hand, then settled down against Miraidon after propping a pillow against the Pokemon. Not exactly the most comfortable surface to sleep against, but he had never minded it much.
He could feel the low hum of electricity that coursed through the dragon change in intensity while it slowly drifted asleep. That sound had been a constant companion to him since his childhood; by now it was synonymous with... Warmth, safety and affection. Lulled by that barely audible droning sound, Turo slowly let himself fall asleep.
---
To his dismay, he got woken up after what seemed to him an instant later by an incoming call. After a couple of failed gestures he managed to flick a screen open in front of his face without standing up from his bed, picking up the call in voice only mode. He glanced at the corner of the screen to read the time. 7:34 AM. He had barely slept for two hours.
« What... ?»
« There's a problem with the time machine. All jumps are cancelled.»
That woke him up quick. Turo sat upright, the screen automatically moving to follow his head, Miraidon blinking awake right behind him.
« Has there been... an accident? » he swallowed, suddenly feeling anxious. Who's turn was it to use the time machine this morning...?
Vega...? No, she had gone yesterday, her next trip was scheduled for next Monday...
Everyone in his field of work knew the horror stories of what could happen if there were problems during a jump. The reports of the very first test jumps - those that had ended badly- were mandatory reading.
"Mismatch" was the cold, technical term for most problems that could happen during a jump. In theory, his own first jump had been a mismatch, but he had been lucky that it had only involved a slight offset on the time coordinate, all things considered.
People had been lost to space. Literal space, because the time machine had shot them at a point in time where the planet had been in a different position around the sun. Or inside the ground. Or right in the middle of a natural disaster.
Or they had simply... disappeared in time, in whatever direction. How far off had they ended up, either in the past or future? No idea. The time machine hadn't been able to print the number, leaving that part of the report eerily blank.
Both possibilities were terrifying just to think about.
After that, in the following decades, they had learned really fucking quick to write software that would calculate and check those coordinates, and then other software that would check that software, and implemented countermeasures, error handling, routine maintenance... but accidents could still happen. The possibility was never zero: people just didn't want to think about it.
He held his breath, expecting some horrifying news.
« Fortunately, no. Porygon 568 must have felt that something was wrong and cancelled the time jump at the very last moment. It's been acting up strangely ever since though. You are our expert in Artificial Pokémon Programming, so...»
Turo let out a sigh of relief; at least nobody had ended up hurt or worse. Still, those were bad news. Porygon 568 pretty much was the time machine; without him, executing a time jump would be too risky.
« I'm coming. Give me twenty minutes.» he answered.
Eighteen minutes after the call, the time necessary for a quick shower to wake him up completely, get dressed, run to the nearest teleporter and notably not eat anything, he entered the time machine room. He wasn't alone. One of the nurses from the nearby Uvanja academy had evidently been called to examine the... well, "Pokémon" part of Porygon 568, its physical body so to speak.
« What's wrong with him?» he asked, kneeling to get a better look at the Pokémon. For once, it wasn't floating at eye level with a human, but actually touching the ground, "wings" pressed close to it's body and eyes closed. Every couple of seconds it would spasm almost violently and shake its head, its eyes would snap open for a brief moment and, for lack of a better term, glitch out in a series of random symbols.
It was a pretty pitiful sight. He patted the Pokémon on the head a couple of times, trying to comfort it.
« Physically, nothing... he didn't get injured in any way.» the nurse seemed perplexed.
« But if you directly ask him what is wrong... Porygon 568, status report.»
« SEGMENTATION FAULT CANNOT ACCESS MEMORY AT ADDRESS 0x2fffff » it screeched suddenly. Both humans flinched at the Pokémon's sudden voice change.
... uh, maybe he could look into that too, there really was no reason for it to blast errors in that tone of voice.
Seriously, it just sounded needlessly creepy.
« Whatever it is that caused this, it must be some error in his code.» the nurse added. Turo nodded, opening up a terminal by his side while he considered how to approach the problem.
« All right, I'll see what I can find... you keep monitoring his physical state. Porygon 568, activate debug mode, authorized by administration key 04860. » he spoke enunciating the necessary credentials. Someone messing with a Porygon's code, especially a Porygon that was handling something as delicate as a time machine, was, of course, bad, so he was one of the few people in the department to have the necessary keys to directly access the Pokémon's data.
« Access g-granted » it answered after a moment, shuddering. Even its voice was slightly distorted. Turo furrowed his eyebrows, thinking. What had happened?
« Show me the stack trace for the last hour...» he asked, and a list of executed commands and subroutines started streaming over his terminal.
He went from kneeling to sitting cross legged on the floor to hunched over the screen when he realized that this was probably going to take a while.
---
It took him ten days of almost non-stop work to isolate the issue with Porygon 568, and he still had no idea of what happened in the actual time machine. Best he could do at the moment was setting up some more error handling procedures so that, if something similar happens again, at least it won't directly affect Porygon 568 so much.
In the meantime, the entire department was pretty much anxiously breathing down on his neck while twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the green light to resume their respective projects, and it is pissing him off quite a bit - it's not like he was keeping everything on hold for fun, he also wanted to resume his time jumps as soon as possible.
« So how long will it take you to fix this?» Ortega asked after poking his head in Turo's office for the third time that morning, coffee in hand.
« Not my words, by the way. The director's. » the other man added after a moment when Turo glared at him, offering him the mug of coffee as a gesture of peace. Turo, grateful, took a sip before realizing that it was boiling hot and hurriedly putting it down, huffing.
« Argh... I'm not "fixing" anything, I'm just making sure that at least Porygon doesn't literally... crash again. » he said, as soon as his mouth stopped burning.
Ortega sat down in front of him, watching Turo type away at the screen in midair, more serious than usual.
« So you don't know what happened in the time machine?»
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
Turo shook his head, not turning away from the console that was floating in front of his face.
« Could have been anything. The settings weren't any different from any other jump we've done, so it shouldn't be anything on our part. Porygon 568 says that he sensed something right before deciding to cancel the jump. »
« "Something"? Didn't he have anything more specific? »
Turo shook his head again.
« But... Porygon's pretty much an AI. They don't do vague, and he still can't tell what happened?» Ortega added. Only then did Turo stop and flick the screen in front of his face to the side to look at his colleague.
« No... and that's what worries me. We like to think that we know so much about time travel, that everything is perfectly safe, that we can treat it the same as stepping in any teleporter to go shopping, or a trip to the Moon... then stuff like this happens and we realize that we still don't know shit about how it actually works. It frustrates me.» he answered after a moment, reclining back in his chair and taking another cautious sip of coffee.
Ortega thinks for a couple of long seconds, then sighs.
« If you are sure that there was no error on our side, then there is nothing else we can do. There will never be a completely fool-proof system-»
« I can sure try-» Turo mumbled under his breath.
« - and you would fail miserably. You said that we can't treat it the same as a teleporter or the Moon... but even those are not perfect. A teleporter could disintegrate you at the atomic level. You could die in space. Or you could wake up one morning, slip in the shower and break your neck. What's the difference? » he shrugs, and Turo just quietly stares at the man for a couple of long seconds.
Ortega's always had this... flippant, devil-may-care attitude toward his job - or life in general, it looked like. His projects were always short and to the point. Never visiting the same point in time more than a couple of times, if he could help it. From what he had read of his reports, never interacted much with the natives of the time period he visited.
He slipped in, perfectly camouflaged in his "historically accurate clothes", witnessed history, and came back. He couldn't imagine doing the same thing.
Treating it like just... just a normal job.
« I... I don't understand you sometimes. You and the others in the department. Are you really not scared of a mismatch...?» he asked, exasperated. They looked more worried about their projects running late than... you know, not getting torn to pieces or worse in the time machine because of a stupid error in the code.
Was it because he was still relatively new, at least in the role of "active" time traveller...?
« Of course I'm scared... but I've made peace with the fact that if it happens, I mean... there's probably still worse ways to go. And you have to admit that "Got shot at the end of time and witnessed the heat death of the universe" would sound awesome as an epitaph.» Ortega laughed.
... ok, yeah, he had to admit that it sounded kind of cool.
----
In the end, it took almost a month for things to go back to normal: they had slowly started doing time jumps again, nervously monitoring the first couple of runs. They had also reduced the number of times the time machine could be booted up each day: for all they knew, maybe it was under too much stress.
That meant that he had inevitably also built up some more time discrepancy with Sada; he had promised to come back to that cliff, like... five days later...?
Was it five or six?
Turo had to replay the last conversation he had recorded just to be sure; he mentally thanked the fact that he had spoken the words out loud as a pure coincidence. Had he simply written it down in her notebook like he had done that night under the stars, he would have been screwed and would have had to guess.
He steps into the time machine room, where the usual Porygon 568 and the nurse for the medical check-ups are waiting for him. He exchanged a brief nod with the artificial Pokémon, who was busy calculating the coordinates.
« Update coordinates for the jump?» it asked while the nurse is slipping the needle into his shoulder. Turo barely noticed it anymore, and checked that the time-anchor is strapped securely to his wrist, before clicking a couple of buttons on the device.
« Yes, set these spacial coordinates as the new landing zone for this time, just move it some... 200 meters south, and add... let's do 4 days and 12 hours to the last time coordinate.» he answered after thinking for a moment. As much as he wanted to, appearing exactly by the cliff would be too risky.
He steps into the time machine with a newfound nervousness and keeps an eye on Porygon 568 while it boots up, almost expecting it to start suddenly glitching out, time and space distorting all around him before sending him who knows where.
Thankfully, nothing feels out of the ordinary and he takes a deep breath, closing his eyes, and a moment later opens them up again in the distant past. He is not quite at the top of the hill they had climbed last time, still hidden by the trees - good, that's exactly what he had wanted.
He had barely started to make his way uphill when he hears Sada's voice call out to him.
Turo looked up just to see her pretty much sprint towards him at full force.
He can't help a little smile in seeing her; he had missed her in that entire month spent mostly staring at computer code and error messages, sometimes finding himself distracted by wondering about what she was doing in that moment... before brutally reminding himself of the fact that the answer was nothing, because she's dead in the present, she has been dead for centuries you idiot-
But she is alive here, and he just wants to forget about everything for a couple of hours and enjoy the time he can spend with her.
His smile turned to confusion when she launched in some excited explanation and he realized that he's one month out of practice with her language, and oh arceus those are a lot of words, coming really fast-
He managed to catch that it's something about the necklace, but after that, he is completely lost and just lets himself get pulled along. His confusion must show pretty clearly on his face because Sada laughs at him, tugging at his hand. She's so obviously excited about something that it just warms his heart.
When Sada shows him the notebook and he gets what she was talking about, he can't help but get a bit excited himself. The DNA analysis had come back during that month, and it had showed the closest still living relative of the mysterious Pokémon as... Miraidon, strangely enough. So he had expected something similar to a Cyclizar, but this drawing... this looked like something else entirely, and not just because of the feathers.
An ancestor of Miraidon from the distant past that no one had ever heard about; this was huge.
He had to take some notes about it.
He started to copy her drawing, trying to reproduce the sketch as closely as possible, and added some notes all around, stuff he wants to check better later. Four limbs, not dissimilar to Miraidon, but with feathers covering his body... what functions did those feathers have? They were big, but didn't look strong enough to make him fly... then again, Cyclizar couldn't fly too... maybe it was something that came only after the transition into Miraidon...?
Sada had also taken some notes with her little pictograph drawings, and he puzzled over them for a couple of seconds. Without knowing what Sada's intention behind each pictograph was, it was pretty much impossible for him to guess at their meaning. There was the drawing of a flame... which could mean anything from the color of the scales to the fact that it could actually breath fire for all that he knew. That was the problem with ideographic scripts; really only the author knew what he or she meant to say with each symbol.
He gives up trying to decipher them and asks about one of them.
She says something incomprehensible that could be anything, then shows him something on the page about the Talonflame.
Oh right, the Talonflame-- he had forgotten all about that.
... he really needed to start jotting down a lot more stuff about what happened during his jumps, especially little things like these that weren't important enough to end up in the official reports.
Sada drew a little nest with... oh, of course. Eggs...?
So the Proto-Miraidon (he needs to find a better name) ate... eggs?
That's a strange diet. Miraidon has never showed much interest in those... a lot must have changed. He writes it down, then a sudden thought hits him: wait... how would she even know this? She must have seen it from quite close... but like he had personally experienced, Pokémon were absolutely vicious in this time.
... just what exactly had she been doing in these five days?
Something dangerous, most probably.
Turo is so focused on the two notebooks that he doesn't really notice Sada getting something else out of her bag until she literally shoved it in front of him with an enormous smile on her face.
His...?
Oh wait. The clothes. Of course.
He had expected a cape with a hood to be fair, similar to what she had worn in the rain, but she had really... sewed him an entire set of clothes, it looked like.
For him.
... it makes him feel so guilty - all that work, and actually he doesn't even need them - that he initially just stared at them in stunned silence, before slowly taking them and standing up.
He should... put them on, at the very least. Turo took off his lab coat and hesitated for some long moments. He... really does not want to take off his bodysuit, so he compromises by slipping the primitive jacket, trousers and finally the boots right over it.
They fit him perfectly... and they are strangely heavy, at least for someone like him who's used to wearing form-fitting, ultra light fabric that was designed to make moving as easy as possible. He isn't used to stuff... pushing down on him like that. The thick Mamoswine fur (he is almost sure it is Mamoswine fur, by the color and just how long it was) also added a lot of volume, another thing he isn't really familiar with. It is... weird, to move his arm or his leg and feel so much stuff all around it. And of course, they are incredibly warm, because that had been the whole point of them after all.
Turo quietly stroked the fur of one of the sleeves.
... this must have taken so much work.
So many precious resources; those Mamoswine pelts... it wasn't like in his time, where all fabric was synthetic and manufactured. Someone had risked their life to hunt these- maybe even Sada herself.
And it was going to get completely wasted on him, and he feels terrible for it. But... she had done it because she wanted to, it's not like he had forced her to do it - quite the contrary, actually-, so...
Turo put the lab coat back on, automatically - he feels almost naked without it - and Sada laughing again snaps him out of his thoughts. He looks down at himself, and realizes why, blushing slightly.
He looks... yeah, completely ridiculous.
Still, her laugh gave him an idea. A silly, little, stupid thing, but now that he's thought of it, he just had to do it. He took the lab coat off again, slinked close to Sada while she was still cackling -showing just the slightest hint of those little fangs -, and wrapped it over her shoulders like a cape. It caught her by surprise, one hand going to her shoulder to touch the smooth white fabric, eyes widening in confusion and half a "what...?" on her lips.
« There. Now we can both look stupid.» he smirked.
Even if she didn't understand his words, she definitely understood his tone; smiling she put it on properly, or at least tried to. It was just too big for her, reaching down almost to her ankles and with her hands disappearing inside the too long sleeves.
It should look ridiculous - and it does, a bit, they've pretty much swapped clothes right now -, but then Sada laughed again and spinned around, apparently just to watch the lab coat flap around her, which she seemed to find pretty amusing. The pure, unbrindled joy in her voice just made his chest hurt.
... he could listen to that laugh for hours and never get tired of it.
He wanted to listen to it for hours, he realized after a second with a pained smile.
Sada had started to play around with the lab coat buttons, fascinated by the material.
« This rock... from your people?» she asked.
« Yes. » He just said.
He knew that she seemed to hate his vague answers - yep, there it was, that little half sad, half annoyed pout -, but he couldn't exactly tell her that it was made from nano-carbon when she didn't even knew about metals yet.
One, it wouldn't mean anything to her, two, it would lead to more questions, so it was better to just let her think that it was some strange rock only found where he was from, far, far away... which was pretty much the truth, in very, very broad terms.
The girl hesitated; she wants to ask him something, and he already had a good idea of what it could be about. It's not the first time she tries to ask him about "his people", and he knows that he is pushing his luck every time he refuses to answer, but he has no other choice. He just shook his head silently before she could even ask him anything and her face fell a bit.
... and now he feels even worse; she has spent who knows how much time sewing those clothes for him and he can't even give her anything in return. At least, not anything... that would leave some trace in the past.
But... there is one thing he can give her. Turo slowly sat back down and picked up his notebook, gesturing for her to sit down near him. Sada complied after a moment, and as expected, started to glance curiously at what he was doing. Turo just smiled and flipped to a new page, then started writing a couple of letters, putting in the effort of making them bigger and more legible instead of his usual hurried handwriting.
Most people in his time had horrible handwriting; you really only wrote stuff manually only when you were actually learning how to write in school, and in some rare jobs like his where you couldn't always summon a screen to type on.
He left quite some space blank on the page, then offered Sada the notebook and pen and pointed to the first symbol, tracing the line on the page with one finger.
« This is an "S".»
Turo saw the confusion in her eyes and after a moment of hesitation gently took her hand. He wrapped his fingers around hers, taking a couple of seconds to help her rearrange them so the pen would sit more comfortably in her hand, in a better position to write. It took him a couple more moments to get it right - he was left-handed, she wasn't-, but he managed to help her copy the first letter of what he had written a couple of times.
Then he pointed to the second letter with his right hand.
« "A".»
Turo watched her expression more than the page as they continued; she was smart, he had no doubt she would quickly catch on to what they were doing, what the strange lines he was having her trace represented. At first, she just looked even more confused, her hand almost hanging limp while he guided her. Then it happens: following him her eyes wandered over the last letter he had written, a second "A" right after the "D", and her entire face just lit up while her eyes darted between the two "A", connecting the dots and recognizing that simple, elementary but incredibly important idea that led to one of humanity's greatest invention.
Same symbol equals same sound.
A writing system that didn't represent general ideas but sounds, where everything that you could ever think of was represented with the same set of symbols.
« This is... this is...» she almost stabs him with the pen with how excited she is, how strongly she is clutching his hand, but Turo couldn't care less.
That spark of wonder in her eyes is the purest thing he has ever seen. It just pains him so much, to think of her in this era. How many great things she is going to miss, simply because she had been born at the wrong moment. He just... he just wants to show her everything, to laugh with her, to discover stuff and get excited about them together, to tell her about his dream of seeing the distant future, so far off for the both of them, and --
But he can't. So this will have to do.
« Yes... ? » he encouraged her, slowly.
« My "name"! It's me» she breaths out, still exhilarated by her realization.
Turo simply smiled, while she wriggled her hand out from his grip to start writing her name again and again, alone this time. Not even a second later, her head snapped up again, looking at him.
« Turo! What is "T"? Show me!» she pretty much pushed the notebook on his lap again, and he is more than happy to spend the next couple of hours quietly showing her how to write the rest of the alphabet.
----
« Time anchor ID 9537 has returned from space-time coordinates 48°51′12″ N, 2°20′55″ E. Welcome ba-» Porygon 568 suddendly got quiet as soon as Turo stepped out of the time machine. The man just sighed, knowing exactly what had gotten the Pokémon to freeze. He took off his lab coat - he had gotten it back from Sada before coming back to his time -, and waited for the Pokémon to continue.
«... many time displaced objects detected.» it said after a moment. If only because he had literally spent a month debugging it and talking with the Pokémon to test every new procedure he had implemented, Turo was almost sure that there was a trace of surprise in it's voice now. It zipped all around him, scanning the new clothes that Sada had made, before stopping to hover at eye level with him.
« Objects are not considered a safety or sanitary hazard. Permission granted to bring them outside of time machine room. Welcome back, Dr. Romero Turo. Hope you had a safe trip. » it beeped. He gave the Pokémon a couple of affectionate pats on the head while heading for the door; it was admittedly a bit weird, knowing that it now had parts of code that he himself had written in it. Not enough to warrant releasing a new Upgrade and version number, it was more like a little patch, but still... weird.
Turo hesitated on the doorway. Unlike pretty much all his previous time jumps, it was only the early afternoon this time.
Which meant the TTLD would be full of people.
Which meant...
« Oh. my. Arceus.»
He sighed again when he caught sight of Vega coming out of the sanity room - and why did it sound like there was ukulele music coming out of it today? -, the redhead staring slack-jawed at his clothes.
... he should have changed before jumping back, even at the risk of getting his face bitten off by that Proto- Miraidon that was lurking around or whatever while he was busy stripping down.
It would have almost been better than this.
« Guys... guys you have to see this - where's Ortega? » she quickly leaned back in the break room wildly gesticulating to everyone else inside, before approaching him to better examine his clothes, quickly followed by other people poking their heads out from the sanity room or their respective offices at the commotion.
« Oh my Arceus... how did you even get these? » she touched one of the pelts on his shoulder.
« The... native girl I've met... made them for me. She thought I was cold.» he mumbled after a moment, prompting a little "aww" from the woman.
« ... wow. I mean. This is real fur.» she added after a moment, caught between amusement and just a touch of horrified awe.
« ... I know.»
« Real Pokémon died to make this.»
« ... I know.»
There's a moment of silence, Vega evidently struggling to decide if she should express her next thought out loud. Turo started to make his way towards the elevators, hoping to catch one before she could. He didn't make it in time.
« ... so how many Rattata do you think it took to make that?» she added pointing at the purple fur lining his hood, snickering.
« I don't want to think about it.» he straight up punched the button to call the elevator, only to be met with a ping and the doors already opening up... to the figure of Ortega, who took a single look at him and started howling with laughter.
« Look at Ötzi the Iceman over here!»
« That was Neolithic, you're off by almost 10'000 years.» he grumbled, stepping inside the elevator.
It takes a moment for Ortega to stop laughing and catch his breath.
« Oh man... you know that now you will have to wear them here before every jump, right? Which means...» he asked, refusing to step out of the elevator.
Turo paused for a second. He... hadn't thought about that, actually.
"Which means..?"
Ortega just patted his shoulder a couple of times.
« ... eh, good luck. » he said, before finally stepping outside and leaving him free to leave.
"Good luck for what?"
He doesn't quite understand what his senior meant with those words, until he had to cross the University Hall at night a couple of days after that exchange with his new "historically accurate clothes" on, and the damn Steelcino literally all jump at him en masse, screeching while trying to "clean him up".
He can start considering himself a real time-traveller by how much he is starting to hate the stupid critters.