“Hello Professor. Are they the guest you mentioned?”

If Dusk could hear the conversation, this woman is clearly Akela. 

“Yeah. She goes by Dusk, and she’s apparently from another universe altogether. Those wings aren’t faked, and she has demonstrable powers that would be really hard to fake by being psychic.”

“Is this a prank? No. Uh, wow. You’re serious. How’d it happen?”

“Interdimensional portal, apparently. Doesn’t match anything on records, but that’s unsurprising since it also looks manmade. Purple-pink portal, gold ring delineating the edge of the portal; dropped her off in the air above Memelene island.”

”Would you mind showing them the portal you went through?”

She instantiates another copy, at full size this time, and repeats her explanation that it appeared in midair, too close for her to stop before she went through it.

“Wow.  I know it was probably pretty stressful to find yourself in a different world, but that’s hard to seperate from how cool I find it, so I’m sorry if I say something insensitive here.”

They turn to Burnet.

”I dunno if that’s manmade. Item-assisted, maybe, but I wouldn’t count on that either. You know how hard it is to make both ends of a portal at range, and if the rings were solving that problem then their teleportation is still unexplained, since non local teleporting is almost as hard. Pokémon are much better at that kind of detail work.”

“If they can- no, that’s not right. I was about to say that if they could appear their machinery in other dimensions, then teleportation of them isn’t implausible, but that’s evidence against my theory, isn’t it. I’ll have to cast our net wider, then.”

Akela smiles.

”Do you think we should start with the precision dex scanner?”

She gestures into the next room one of the simpler machines. It has a little booth, and what looks sorta like a high-tech camera facing the entrance.

“It’s probably safest to start there rather than anything more fragile, although the space-time mapper would be fine.”

Burnet heads across the room, pulls out a keycard, and swipes open the door. 

-that'll open from the inside without a card, right?

“Yes, it will; it’d be a gross violation of safety codes otherwise. There’s also a fire exit in the back right corner, over there.”

“Seriously? You didn’t even go over lab safety before you got here?”

She turns to Dusk.

”So. Rules of Lab. Always keep track of emergency exits - there’s one in the lab, back right, and one just across the hall - and make sure you have a clear path out. Make sure to stand clear of any moving machinery at all times. We don’t have anything fast here, but it’s a bad habit to get into and even getting only slightly injured is a bad thing; you’ll only run into that here if we end up using the Rotator, which is for stress testing some of our portal machines and won’t come up. No playing around, no food or drink, no loud noises or other distractions for people operating machinery.”

“It didn’t come up. I got excited, and usually the only people I get to talk about are already in the field. Sorry about that, Dusk, that could have been unsafe.”

Okay, she can do that.

The scanner doesn’t feel like anything, and it’s done in three seconds. Apparently, the results it got were completely unprecedented, to the point that Akela calls over two more specialized scientists from the next room, and they in turn get lost in a flurry of conversation. It’s not easy to make sense of all the jargon, and their excitability seems to be losing some of the words there, but it’s possible to catch words like “no solosis-based microbial strains at all” and “like an entirely new type, no, more than that” and “wing structure doesn’t match anything on record” and “at least a dozen new thesis from this alone.” If Dusk is particularly interested, they’d probably be willing to give more than that, but they aren’t going to be volunteering much.

“Up to do the space-time mapper? It’s the blue platform over there. It checks for lingering dimensional anomalies; we probably won’t get much out of it due to how clean that portal looked, but there’s almost certainly something.”

Sure. Also Professor Burnet might want to explain her shapeshifting before those guys jump to too many conclusions about her wings.

“Right. Kalua, Timothy, you should probably be aware that Dusk can shapeshift; not as much as a Ditto or a Mew, but she wasn’t born with those wings.”

One of them - it’s hard to say which - turns to her, interrupting his commentary on chemical compositions.

”We can tell. It’s hard to map much of anything from the DNA without more specialized equipment, but it’s definitely all wrong for the wings, we’re able to notice that from a glance. The structure’s still entirely foreign; I’m not sure it’s accurate to say that it’s entirely less accurate than a Ditto’s transformation, since they usually need an example to copy exactly for detail work and  these wings are complex in all the wrong ways for that. It seems to be closest to Mothim’s wings, in structure, but even that’s obviously not a perfect match.”

They're based on a moth from her world - the Dingy Cutworm Moth, they're usually just different shades of brown - but she doesn't have to copy anything and wasn't trying for an exact match, yeah.

The display for the space-time mapper is fairly innocuous. According to its sensors, the open air above the platform is slightly curved beyond the effect of gravity itself, but any detail beyond that requires quite a bit of specialized knowledge that Dusk doesn't have.

She gets onto the platform.

"Definitely didn't travel through Ultra Space, then, not that there was much doubt. There's an unprecedented pattern, but it's hard to say whether that was from the portal or just the characteristics of your native dimension. Whichever it is, we could definitely identify it in another sample, but that's significantly less useful if we don't know which it is."

"Huh. I didn't know you could do that."

She can switch wings and give them a feather, if something that's part of her but didn't go through the portal would be useful to look at.

"And that bit has nothing on it. Even when an Ultra Beast repairs itself, the new bits still carry the same Beast Boost with them, but your feather has nothing of the sort. I've never seen anything like it."