Dusk continues following; she switches back to moth wings before entering the small space.

The elevator goes up, and opens onto a hallway. 

Burnet walks out, heads down past a conference room, and stops by a door with a sign helpfully saying 'Director Burnet's Office.'

The office has two different bookshelves, some chairs, and a desk with a computer of a model Dusk has never seen before and some papers messily scattered on it. Burnet sits down at her desk and types something.

"Could you describe the portal that you came through again? I'll see if we have any recorded matches."

Sure.

She makes a miniature model of it on the professor's desk: Like that, but big enough for her to fly through comfortably, and she might have the exact colors slightly wrong. And the outlines are from her spell, not actually part of it.

She nods, types up a description, puts a few keywords into a search bar and clicks a few of the links that come up. After 5 minutes of searching, she looks up from her screen.

"It doesn't match anything we've encountered. It's superficially like an ultra wormhole, but it's flat and has a barrier to define its edge. Bronzong's dimensional shifting doesn't look anything like that, and it's not one of the spirit world portals that Pokémon like Dusknoir favor. The edge rules out a reverse world portal, but if I'm being honest so is the fact that it brought you here, reverse world portals very emphatically only go there. It's almost certainly not one of the lake guardian's portals, especially since we don't even know for sure that they have one, and I'm entirely certain its not an inter-dream portal. Unown aren't known to have the power to pull that off at all, and if they did it would take enough of them in the area that you couldn't help but notice them. The only Pokémon we have on record with the power to make a portal that looks like that are Palkia and Arceus, neither of which is likely. Add in that the ring is pretty clearly artificial and it looks like we're dealing with humans.

"On one hand, this means we probably can't just reuse whatever brought you here in the first place; whoever brought you here seems to have gone to some lengths to ensure they weren't discovered, so it seems fairly unlikely that we'll be easily able to turn them up, and while I'll have some people keep checking it's looking unlikely that this is some undiscovered Pokémon. On the other hand, if someone else can make it, then there shouldn't be any reason we can't do the same here; it might take a while to figure it out, but now that we have a proof of concept it's pretty exciting. If you're up for it, I'd love to run some tests to see if there's anything we can figure out about the method, but if you'd prefer not to I'm much more confident we can figure it out ourselves eventually."

She's probably up for it. What's involved?

“Depends on what you’re up for, but we’d want to check for radiation, typed energy, infinity energy, all of which we can do by harmless scans of varying times. We’d want to look for any still-warped space, although even natural wormholes don’t tend to leave that much residue. Some tissue sample might let us figure out traits of your world of origin, but it might not. We’d definitely want to check to see if we can detect your magical powers, but if our standard psychic-and-ghost sensors draw a blank we’d have to make something custom for that rather than just doing it today.”

She trails off, trying to think of anything more, then starts.

”Unless magical girls have special resistances, we you’ll probably want to check out a hospital some time soon to make sure your world isn’t different enough that you’re missing critical vaccinations or other disease immunities.”

She nods along until Professor Burnet mentions going to a hospital, and then goes tense and wary.

Burnet is not good with people. She has, however, just spent the last three months with Lillie, and is trained to not ignore cues and evidence from the world around her under any circumstances.

”Are you alright? I’m sorry if I broke some kind of taboo or similar from your home. Was it... referring to the building from that sentence?”

Nod.

Doctors aren't - safe, really - with kids who don't talk, where she's from. And she doesn't know that they are here, either.

The first thing Burnet wants to do, as shock and horror attempt to take control of her face, is comment on how awful that is. She tries to stop herself - They know how bad it was, they don’t always know you aren’t horrified by them, even when you explain adults who have been being nice suddenly changing can be awful - if she hadn’t  known with Lillie, she wouldn’t have been able to. As it is, some of it still shows on her face, but she manages to bite down on the reassurance that no one at the hospital is like that. That’s not what she needs to say.

”If you don’t want to go the hospital, no one is going to force you. If something does go wrong, a Pokémon center should be able to handle almost everything, and almost everyone here is immunized anyway; for all but the most infectious diseases, we pass the vaccination rate for herd immunity. Some other kinds like Tetanus that aren’t interpersonal might be an issue anyway, maybe, but it’s not common anyway and we do get cases like that anyway so it won’t be unprecedented.”

Wow, that was no much not what you needed to say. B-, and only that high due to effort.

She's still a little tense, but: Okay. Thanks.

“I’d say anyone would, but that’s not true, I guess.”

Burnet struggles to continue, but this is something that has to be said.

”Your current caretakers are treating you well now, right? Or should I be arranging a permamant residence, or sending you back to your world away from them?”

She likes her grownups. She wouldn't have asked to go back if she didn't.

At that,  a genuine smile appears on Burnet’s face.

”That’s good to hear. It sounded like that, but... that’s not something I can live with just assuming. I’m glad you found some people who you can trust.”

She nods, but still seems stressed.

It’s probsbly best not to dwell on it, she decides. Instead, she pulls out her Pokédex, and makes a call.

It rings twice, then they pick up.

”Hey, professor. Did something come up? I thought it was your day off.”

“You know how it always is, Akela. Life just has a way of surprising you with interesting things.”

“Better than being bored. What can I do for you?”

“I’ll be coming by the main lab in a few minutes, with a guest. Please get things ready for a full examination. We’ll be starting with the passive sensors. Oh, and ask around if anyone’s got a list of all the unconfirmed portals we have, those don’t seem to be in the normal database anymore.”

“Understood.” 

The phone call hangs up.

Burnet puts away the Pokédex, and turns to Dusk.

”Anything else last minute you’d like to ask about or do first, or should we save questions until you have some idea what kinds of machinery you’d want to ask questions about?”

Second thing.

(Her wings twitch, perhaps nervously.)

The building is hardly small, but Burnet turns out to be right about her prediction of how long it would take to get there, even keeping pace with Dusk. When she opens the door about 4 minutes later, it’s to an enormous room - no, pair of rooms. At the center of the first is a set of desks, each with whta looks like an extremely high-texh desktop computer, and on the walls are massive displays. Some are maps, with colored in areas that Dusk probably can’t identify, some are displays of various holes in space (none match hers),a few have some complex mathematicsl equations on them, with parts highlighted and scientists in labcoats arguing in front of them. The other room is less visible through the strange window, but is filled with various unfamiliar machinery. The floor is a black and white, almost checkerboard tile pattern, and there are a few dozen people within. A few start at her appearance, but most are busy with conversation or work.