The Wrong Half of a Fish

Chapter Fifty-Four

The Wrong Half of a Fish

The Rowan archive waited exactly where Gray had left it the previous evening, which was somehow more irritating than if somebody had moved it.

He found the two folders on the conference table shortly after eight, stacked neatly beneath a storage manifest Elias had apparently added sometime before leaving. Gray stood over them with a mug of coffee in one hand, rereading the faded label even though he remembered perfectly well what it said.

ROWAN ARCHIVE — FOREIGN EXCHANGE MATERIALS

Underneath, in smaller print, somebody had written GALAR in black marker.

Gray had spent most of the walk from the house to the lab telling himself there was no particular reason to be interested. Rowan had corresponded internationally for decades, and a regional Professor accumulated foreign samples the way old houses accumulated dust: slowly, continuously, and in places nobody thought to inspect until years later. Half the archive contained sediment cores from Johto, plant specimens from Hoenn, cast impressions from Kanto, or administrative records from researchers Gray had only vaguely heard of. Galar was simply farther away than most of them, and that was all.

He sat down before he could continue pretending the distinction mattered. Bastiodon lowered himself beside the table with the long, armored exhale of a Pokémon who had already accepted that his trainer would not be going anywhere interesting for a while. Gray set the coffee near his laptop, opened the first folder, and found seventeen years of somebody else’s unfinished academic conversation waiting for him.

Most of it was disappointingly normal. There were letters discussing fossil-restoration calibration, correspondence about mineral contamination in partially preserved samples, notes comparing Sinnohan Shieldon remains with armored fossil species found farther west, and several pages of Rowan complaining—in the restrained language of a man who apparently knew how to be professional—that an exchange partner had shipped samples without adequate geological context. Gray approved of that complaint immediately.

He was halfway through a letter about matrix density when Elias appeared in the doorway carrying a hard black preservation case with both hands.

“You started without me.”

Gray looked up. “You didn’t say you were coming.”

“I found the files.”

“That does not establish ownership.”

“It establishes that I know where the other half of the problem is.”

Gray’s attention moved to the case before he could stop himself.

Elias noticed at once. “There it is.”

“What?”

“That expression.”

Gray frowned. “People keep saying that as though I have one face for every kind of professional interest.”

“You have several. This is the one where you forget coffee exists.”

Gray glanced at the untouched mug beside his laptop and then back at Elias. “Coincidence.”

“Obviously.”

Elias set the preservation case on the table and rotated it so the old shipping labels faced Gray. Most had faded badly, but one League customs seal remained legible beneath a scratched layer of laminate: GALAR REGION — SCIENTIFIC MATERIAL TRANSFER. The receiving institution was Rowan’s laboratory, and the date was eleven years earlier.

Gray’s irritation arrived before his excitement, which he considered reassuring. “This has been here for eleven years?”

“Apparently.”

“Uncatalogued?”

“Catalogued badly.”

“That is worse.”

“I thought you might say that.”

Gray pulled the manifest closer. The transfer record listed two specimens under codes he did not recognize, followed by descriptions so vague they bordered on insulting: Partial fossil component — aquatic morphology and Partial fossil component — draconic morphology.

He stared at the wording for several seconds. “Who wrote this?”

“No idea.”

“They should be ashamed.”

“They may be dead.”

“That does not improve the description.”

Elias unlocked the case.

The interior was divided into two padded compartments, each holding a fossilized structure unlike anything Gray kept in the regular Sinnoh collections. Neither resembled a conventional full specimen. There was no complete skull, no recognizable spinal sequence, no intact shell, limb, or body plate that could be comfortably placed within the restoration traditions Gray knew best.

The first fossil was broad and flattened, its dense mineralization hinting at an aquatic Pokémon without giving him enough morphology to identify one cleanly. The second was thicker and stranger, obviously associated with some large-bodied ancient Pokémon whose anatomy could not be reconstructed from the preserved fragment alone.

Gray leaned closer without touching either one. “Oh.”

Elias folded his arms. “That was approximately my reaction.”

Gray looked at the labels fixed beneath the padding.

Fossilized Fish.

Fossilized Drake.

The names were not taxonomic and barely qualified as descriptive, but irritation lost ground almost immediately to recognition. Galar. Fragmentary fossils. Restoration combinations. His eyes moved from the Fish to the Drake and stayed there a fraction too long.

He knew what those two could become.

From the adjoining office, Lyra said, “You’re making the face again.”

Gray turned. She stood in the doorway with a tablet against one hip and a cup of tea in the other hand, her gaze moving from him to the open case and then to Elias, who looked suspiciously pleased to no longer be responsible for the conversation.

“What face?”

“The one from yesterday when you found the Galar seal.”

“I was reading.”

“You were interested.”

“Those are compatible activities.”

Lyra crossed the room and stopped beside the case. “What are they?”

“Fossilized Fish and Fossilized Drake.”

She looked at him.

Gray waited.

“That sounds made up.”

“It is what Galar calls them.”

“That does not make it sound less made up.”

“No.”

She bent slightly for a better look, careful not to touch the padding. “And these two make…”

Gray hesitated for half a second.

That was enough.

Lyra turned toward him. “You know.”

“Of course I know.”

“What?”

He looked back into the case. “Dracovish.”

There was a brief silence before Lyra smiled.

Gray disliked the smile immediately. “No.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

“I really wasn’t.”

“You look like you were about to.”

“That’s rich coming from you.”

Elias made a quiet sound suspiciously close to a laugh and opened his laptop.

Gray ignored both of them and pulled the Galar correspondence closer. “We do not know whether Rowan intended to restore them. The transfer documentation says comparative study, not restoration authorization, and I want to know whether the materials legally transferred to the lab or remained part of an exchange collection.”

Lyra was still smiling. “You want a Dracovish.”

Gray looked at her.

She took a drink of tea.

“That is completely irrelevant to what I just said.”

“It wasn’t a denial.”

“I am trying to determine the provenance of two foreign fossil specimens that have been sitting in improperly labeled storage for eleven years.”

“And separately, you want a Dracovish.”

“There is no separately yet.”

“Interesting choice of word.”

Gray stared at her long enough that she finally turned back toward the fossils.

Elias rescued him, though probably by accident. “There’s a reference in Rowan’s correspondence from about six months after the transfer. Page thirty-four.”

Gray found it.

The letter had been written to a Galarian researcher named Dr. Marian Bell, apparently attached at the time to a fossil-restoration program in the western part of the region. Rowan’s tone was cordial but skeptical, and Gray found himself liking him more with every paragraph.

Rowan had wanted to understand what Galarian restoration systems were actually doing with incomplete fossils that did not represent conventionally reconstructable organisms. He questioned whether the resulting Pokémon represented historical species, machine-mediated extrapolations, or biologically stable composites assembled from compatible ancient material.

Gray stopped reading and went through the paragraph again.

Lyra leaned closer. “That sounds familiar.”

“He was asking the correct question.”

“The same one you were about to ask.”

“Yes.”

“Which means?”

“That he was competent.”

“I wasn’t questioning Rowan.”

“You sounded like you were questioning me.”

“I was.”

Gray returned to the letter.

The Galarian response had been preserved immediately behind it. Marian Bell objected to the assumption that anatomical unfamiliarity implied artificiality, which Gray considered fair. According to her, repeated restorations using equivalent fossil pairings produced remarkably consistent Pokémon with stable morphology, predictable behavioral tendencies, and no evidence that the machinery was improvising randomly from one attempt to the next.

That did not answer the central question. If anything, it made the problem more interesting.

Gray opened his laptop.

Lyra saw him do it. “What are you looking up?”

“Current literature.”

“You have not finished Rowan’s letters.”

“I can do both.”

“That has historically been the beginning of several problems.”

Without looking away from his own screen, Elias said, “I’m staying out of this.”

Gray glanced toward him. “You brought the fossils in here.”

“That was archival work. Everything after opening the case is your fault.”

Gray found three contemporary papers from Galar within minutes.

The first dealt with Dracozolt locomotion, the second with thermoregulatory limitations in Arctovish and Arctozolt, and the third was a comparative veterinary survey covering all four of Galar’s commonly restored fossil combinations. He opened that one first, and for the next several minutes the room quieted to keyboard clicks, the low hum of the monitor, and the occasional scrape of Bastiodon shifting beside the table.

The veterinary survey complicated everything in exactly the way Gray had hoped it would not. The restored Pokémon were anatomically bizarre by the standards of conventional paleontology, but the paper did not describe them as constantly sick, crippled, or incapable of normal life. There were species-specific care needs, biomechanical peculiarities, and substantial variation between individuals, yet the overall picture was not one of machines producing suffering creatures that should never have existed. Gray disliked convenient evidence and distrusted easy conclusions; inconvenient evidence, at least, usually meant there was something worth learning.

He enlarged a skeletal scan of a mature Dracovish. The animal’s head and forward anatomy were positioned in a way that offended several intuitive assumptions about what an aquatic vertebrate-shaped Pokémon ought to look like, while the rear body was robust enough to suggest an entirely different evolutionary logic. The proportions were strange enough that an older generation of researchers had apparently spent years arguing over whether Galarian restoration was reconstructing extinct life or creating something new from ancient pieces. Gray worked through the methods section, the supplementary material, and one of the cited papers before finally looking up and realizing Tessa had been standing in the doorway long enough to watch him ignore the room.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from NovelPhoenix; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

She glanced from the open fossil case to the anatomical scan on the wall monitor. “That looks uncomfortable.”

Gray pointed toward the paper. “Apparently not necessarily.”

“Necessarily is doing a lot of work there.”

“Yes.”

Tessa came farther in, set the folder she had been carrying on the nearest desk, and studied the image more closely. “What am I looking at?”

“Dracovish. Galarian fossil restoration. Fish and Drake combination.”

“And you have both?”

“I have access to both,” Gray said, glancing toward the preservation case. “Ownership is still unclear.”

Tessa nodded toward the screen instead. “Does it hurt?”

That pulled him up short for half a second, not because the question surprised him but because it cut past several layers of the argument he had been building in his head. “That is what I’m trying to determine.”

“Good.”

Gray looked at her. “I expected a more complicated reaction.”

“It is complicated. That’s why I asked the first useful question.”

Lyra, seated on the edge of another desk with her tablet in hand, looked up from what she had been reading. “Gray has mostly been asking whether it represents an authentic extinct species.”

“That is also useful,” Tessa said. “After we know whether making one causes it to spend its life miserable.”

Gray turned the monitor slightly so she could see the relevant table. “This long-term survey followed forty-two restored individuals across all four combinations. There are chronic-care considerations, but nothing supporting universal pain or nonviability. Dracovish in particular appear physically active once conditioned appropriately, and aquatic activity reduces some of the mechanical load associated with terrestrial movement.”

Tessa read part of the abstract, then scrolled through the methodology with one finger. “Forty-two isn’t enormous.”

“No.”

“Selection bias?”

“Possible. Several privately held individuals were lost to follow-up.”

“What about respiratory function?”

“Unusual, but apparently stable.”

“Feeding?”

Gray opened another section and skimmed until he found the relevant table. “Strong bite mechanics. Diet heavily protein-biased in most documented cases, though there is individual variation.”

Tessa considered that, then looked at him again. “Behavior?”

Gray’s expression soured. “That is where the literature becomes irritating.”

“How?”

“It keeps describing them as energetic.”

“That is not a behavior profile.”

“I know. Social tolerance is sparse, stress behaviors are barely discussed, sleep is almost nonexistent, and most of the handling notes are veterinary restraint.”

Tessa let out a slow breath and pulled out a chair. “So they wrote an entire health paper about Pokémon and forgot to ask what being the Pokémon is like.”

Gray looked back at the screen. “That is unfair.”

“Is it wrong?”

He took a moment before answering. “Not entirely.”

That was how the discussion became serious.

For nearly an hour they moved through the available records, separating the questions that mattered to restoration science from the questions that mattered to Gray personally, though the two categories overlapped more than he liked. The basic mechanical mystery refused to simplify. Fossilized Fish and Fossilized Drake were incomplete components; they did not form a conventional skeletal specimen from which one could reconstruct a single obvious organism the way a sufficiently complete Shieldon fossil could inform a Bastiodon-line restoration. And yet Galarian restoration reliably produced Dracovish from that pairing.

Reliably was the word Gray kept returning to.

If the machines were merely compensating for missing data through some unknown synthesis process, why did equivalent fossil combinations produce stable, repeatable outcomes? If Dracovish represented a genuine extinct species, why had nobody found a complete enough fossil skeleton to prove that morphology directly? And if Fish and Drake belonged to separate species, what exactly was the restoration system recognizing when it joined them into one viable organism? The scientist in Gray was delighted by the number of ways the evidence refused to settle the question. The paleontologist in him wanted to throw something.

“This is ridiculous,” he said eventually.

Lyra looked up from her tablet. “You’ve said that four times.”

“Because it remains true.”

“You also haven’t stopped smiling.”

Gray stopped smiling.

Tessa noticed and laughed. “That may have made it worse.”

“I am not enjoying the methodology.”

“No,” Lyra said. “You’re enjoying the problem.”

“That is different.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

Bastiodon lifted his head at Gray’s voice and rested the edge of his shield against Gray’s thigh. Gray’s hand went to the familiar armor automatically, fingers settling into scratches he had known for years. The contact quieted something in him that had been running too fast since the fossils came out of storage.

Bastiodon had begun as a fossil too, but never as an abstraction. Not as a research question, not as a line of preserved biological information, and not as a collection of mineralized structures waiting to be argued over by adults in lab coats. He had been a fossil Gray’s father found, then a Shieldon Gray met when he was ten. Gray still remembered the restoration room: the harsh light, the smell of disinfectant and heated machinery, the technicians telling him not to approach too quickly. Shieldon had been furious, confused, and unimpressed by every human in the room until, after several minutes of glaring, he had walked over and hit Gray in the shin with his face.

Researchers could talk around Gray all they wanted about reconstruction fidelity, inferred genetic sequences, mineral preservation, and restoration error. Somewhere beneath all of that, he would always remember a small Shieldon choosing his leg as something worth standing beside.

His hand remained on Bastiodon’s shield while he stared at the Dracovish scan. Tessa noticed the silence and, characteristically, left it alone.

Lyra did not. “You really do want one.”

Gray exhaled through his nose. “This is not about wanting one.”

“It can be about more than one thing.”

“That sentence is annoyingly difficult to argue with.”

“I know.”

He looked toward the Fish and Drake in their preservation case. “Wanting one is not a reason to restore one.”

Tessa nodded slowly. “There it is.”

Gray glanced at her. “What?”

“That’s the actual question you’ve been circling. Not whether Dracovish is interesting. You already know it is. You’re trying to decide whether restoring one would be defensible.”

“I have been researching.”

“You have been researching whether restoring one is defensible.”

“Those are not mutually exclusive.”

“No,” Tessa said, folding her arms on the table. “So what would you need?”

Gray already knew.

“Long-term veterinary records. Direct observation of mature individuals. Restoration protocols. Better behavioral studies than these. Evidence about chronic pain, if any. Habitat requirements. Whether the morphology creates predictable health problems as they age. Whether equivalent restorations remain consistent over multiple generations of machines and facilities. I want to know what the system is actually doing with missing information, even if the answer is that nobody knows.” Pasted markdown

Lyra looked toward the preservation case. “And if all of that looks good?”

Gray frowned at her, because he knew perfectly well what she was asking and preferred the version of the conversation where she had not asked it.

“Then I would have fewer objections.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

“I know.”

Tessa’s mouth curved slightly as she watched the exchange. “She’s doing the waiting thing.”

Gray pointed at her without taking his eyes off Lyra. “Do not start.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

Lyra remained patient, which Gray found considerably more irritating than if she had simply argued with him.

Eventually he looked back toward the Dracovish scan on the monitor. The reconstructed skeleton remained strange no matter how long he studied it, but strange was not synonymous with wrong, and wrong was not synonymous with suffering. If anything, the last several hours had made him increasingly uncomfortable with how easily those ideas could blur together.

“If the resulting Pokémon is healthy, capable of normal agency, able to live without chronic suffering, and the restoration process is repeatable enough that we are not gambling with the individual’s body, then the fact that its anatomy looks ridiculous is not an ethical argument against its existence.”

Tessa nodded once, apparently satisfied with that much.

Gray continued before either woman could interpret the statement too enthusiastically. “That still does not mean I’m restoring these.”

“Of course not,” Lyra said.

Something about her tone made him suspicious. “I mean it.”

“I believe you.”

“That somehow sounds worse.”

“It probably does.”

Elias had spent most of the discussion quietly working through the archive manifests, leaving the ethical argument to people who had volunteered for it. Now he rotated his laptop toward Gray and tapped one of the scanned attachments.

“I found the transfer agreement.”

Gray shifted closer.

The document had been buried behind the original customs declaration, several pages deeper than any reasonable filing system should have allowed. Rowan’s laboratory had received the Fossilized Fish and Fossilized Drake permanently as part of a reciprocal academic exchange. Galar retained acknowledgment rights if the specific specimens were used in published comparative work, but there was no return requirement and no continuing institutional claim over them.

Gray read the relevant paragraph twice before sitting back. “So they belong to the lab.”

“Legally, yes.”

Lyra looked at him.

Gray very deliberately did not look back.

“They belong to the lab,” he repeated, mostly because saying it aloud made the situation feel more concrete.

Elias adjusted his glasses. “That is what I just said.”

“I was confirming.”

“Of course.”

Gray closed the transfer agreement and stood, partly because he had made a decision and partly because remaining seated while three people watched him make it was becoming intolerable.

“I’m contacting Galar.”

Lyra leaned back in her chair. “Already?”

“Yes.”

“You found the fossils this morning.”

“And?”

“You generally pretend to deliberate longer before deciding to travel internationally.”

“I have not decided to travel internationally.”

Tessa glanced toward the wall monitor, where Gray had already opened the contact page for the Galarian fossil research authority.

“Right.”

“This is an inquiry.”

“Obviously.”

Gray chose not to respond to the tone and opened a blank message.

Lyra came to stand beside him while he drafted. The first version lasted four sentences before she interrupted.

“No.”

Gray stopped typing and looked up at her. “What?”

“You cannot send that.”

“Why?”

“Read the third sentence.”

He did.

I am particularly interested in determining whether Galarian restoration procedures produce biologically coherent outcomes from fragmentary fossil combinations whose historical anatomical validity remains unresolved.

Gray read it again, found it precise, and looked back at Lyra. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It sounds like you’re politely asking whether they manufacture monsters.”

“I did not use the word monster.”

“You didn’t need to.”

“That is not what the sentence says.”

“That is absolutely what it sounds like.”

Tessa, still sitting near the table, glanced up. “She’s right.”

Gray turned toward her. “You are not involved in the email.”

“I became involved when you asked whether the resulting Pokémon suffer.”

“That was a separate conversation.”

“It stopped being separate when you decided to ask the people who restore them.”

Gray looked back at the sentence.

He hated revising accurate language for social reasons. Unfortunately, years of professional communication had taught him that accurately expressing an idea occasionally required not phrasing it in a way that made the recipient defensive before they reached the fifth line.

He deleted the sentence.

The second draft took longer, mostly because Lyra insisted on reading over his shoulder.

Gray introduced himself, though he suspected Professor Gray Linden, Sinnoh Regional Pokémon Professor in the signature would handle most of that work. He explained that Rowan’s archived Galarian materials had recently resurfaced, supplied the original transfer numbers for the Fossilized Fish and Fossilized Drake, and summarized his own experience with restoration, paleobiology, archaeology, and historical ecology. At Lyra’s insistence, he referenced the recent protected subterranean ecosystem work as relevant evidence of his current research rather than describing it as the expedition where everything repeatedly became worse.

Then he laid out what he actually wanted: access to restoration methodology, long-term welfare data, direct observation of restored fossil Pokémon, consultation with both paleontologists and veterinary researchers, and comparative analysis between the conventional restoration systems he knew from Sinnoh and Hoenn and the combinatorial process used in Galar. Most importantly, he stated plainly that the Fish and Drake would remain sealed until that review was complete. Pasted markdown

Lyra read through the final version once more. “This sounds like a normal professional email.”

Gray looked offended. “Most of my emails are normal.”

Elias laughed from the other side of the room.

Gray turned toward him. “You have complained repeatedly that my emails are too short.”

“Yes.”

“That is not the same thing as abnormal.”

“You once answered a three-page funding inquiry with ‘No. Bad premise.’”

“The premise was bad.”

Lyra hit send before the argument could expand.

Gray stared at the confirmation message for a moment. “There.”

“There,” she agreed, returning to her desk. “Now we wait.”

Gray disliked that immediately.

Fortunately, Galar apparently disliked waiting too.

The reply arrived fifty-three minutes later. Gray had technically moved on to other work by then, although the phrase moved on became less convincing when one noticed the two Dracovish locomotion studies still open beside his actual project files. His inbox chimed while he was comparing aquatic gait data, and the sender’s name made him stop before he had even opened the message.

Dr. Marian Bell.

“That name was in Rowan’s letters.”

Elias looked up from across the room. “She’s still active?”

“Apparently.”

Gray opened the email.

Bell began by expressing surprise that Rowan’s exchange materials had resurfaced after so many years. More interestingly, she remembered the specific Fish and Drake specimens and Rowan’s reluctance to restore them without understanding Galarian reconstruction more thoroughly.

Gray reread that paragraph.

Rowan had not misplaced the fossils in an archive and forgotten them.

He had deliberately stopped.

That distinction mattered more than Gray expected. Whatever else Rowan had intended to do with the exchange, he had reached the same boundary Gray had reached: curiosity was not enough reason to turn the machine on.

Bell’s message continued at much greater length. She had followed Gray’s recent publication concerning fossil-associated Pokémon populations in Sinnoh and described it as the sort of ecological evidence restoration researchers spent entire careers wishing they possessed. More importantly, she agreed that much of the published Galarian literature did a poor job addressing precisely the questions Gray had raised about long-term behavior, welfare, and the relationship between restored anatomy and historical authenticity.

Then came the practical offer.

Bell could arrange access to archived restoration data, veterinary records, active facilities, and living members of all four commonly restored Galarian fossil combinations. Gray would also be permitted to inspect source fossils from multiple excavation sites and speak directly with researchers who had spent years studying the Fish, Drake, Bird, and Dino components.

His reading slowed when he reached the final paragraph.

If Professor Linden is willing to travel to Galar, I believe an in-person comparative review would be considerably more useful than exchanging another decade of letters. You are welcome to bring the Fish and Drake specimens back with you for examination under current equipment. No restoration would be performed without your explicit authorization.

Lyra had been working at the next desk, but Gray had apparently been silent long enough for that to become suspicious.

“What?”

He kept reading.

“Gray. What?”

He rotated the monitor toward her.

Lyra read the invitation, and her eyebrows rose slightly. “That was fast.”

“Yes.”

“They’re inviting you to Galar.”

“They’re inviting us to conduct a comparative review.”

“Those are the same thing when the comparative review is in Galar.”

Gray had already opened Bell’s attachment containing institutional visitor procedures.

Lyra noticed that too. “You were not planning to go ten seconds ago.”

“I was considering the possibility.”

“You have the travel paperwork open.”

“I need to know the requirements before deciding whether the possibility is practical.”

“You opened it before you answered her.”

“That is called efficiency.”

Lyra smiled and returned to her desk, apparently content to let him incriminate himself.

Gray began reading the requirements.

His enthusiasm survived the first page.

It weakened on the second.

International League documentation, Pokémon travel certification, fossil transport authorization, protected biological-material declarations, institutional visitor clearance, temporary research credentials, liability documentation, insurance information, foreign laboratory access agreements, and several forms whose only apparent purpose was to confirm information already requested by another form.

Gray scrolled farther.

“This is obscene.”

Lyra looked over. “What?”

“The paperwork.”

“You wanted international fossil access.”

“I wanted fossils. I did not ask for twenty-three pages of forms.”

“Those usually come together.”

“That is a design failure.”

She returned to her tablet. “You’re still going.”

Gray looked at the application again.

He was.

Probably.

Almost certainly.

He simply had no intention of admitting that before the paperwork had at least earned his resentment.

By late afternoon, Gray had replied to Bell, thanking her for the invitation and explaining that he would confirm travel once Sinnoh League authorization and laboratory scheduling were settled. Lyra had begun reorganizing the next two weeks without being asked, which Gray deliberately ignored because acknowledging it would require acknowledging why she was doing it.

Tessa eventually returned to the ranch. Elias went back to archival storage after making Gray promise not to move the fossils without updating the chain-of-custody file. Marcus appeared briefly near the end of the day, learned that Galar had invited Gray to inspect its fossil restoration program, and spent several seconds thinking before saying, “Roark is going to be furious.”

Gray looked up. “Why?”

Marcus stared at him.

Gray understood.

“Oh.”

Marcus nodded. “Exactly.”

Roark, who regarded fossils with approximately the same restraint Gray did, was going to learn that Gray had discovered two Galarian specimens in storage and might now travel across the world to investigate them without him.

The thought improved Gray’s mood considerably.

By evening, the lab had settled into quiet. Most of the staff had gone home or moved elsewhere on the property, leaving only the soft hum of equipment and occasional sounds from the ranch beyond the windows. Gray remained at the worktable with Bastiodon beside him and the preservation case still open beneath the overhead light.

The Fish and Drake had not become any more informative over the course of the day. They remained two incomplete pieces of ancient biology, preserved long enough to become questions that neither Rowan nor Galar had managed to answer cleanly.

Gray rested one hand against Bastiodon’s shield.

“This is ridiculous.”

Bastiodon rumbled without opening his eyes.

Gray glanced down. “You’re not helping.”

The answering rumble was slightly deeper, which Gray decided probably meant whichever interpretation was least flattering.

He looked back toward the fossils.

There were legitimate reasons to go to Galar, enough that he did not need to invent any. Comparative restoration science mattered. Galar’s methods raised serious questions about extinct Pokémon identity, machine reconstruction, anatomy, welfare, and the limits of what fossil evidence could actually prove about ancient life. Rowan had cared enough about those questions to begin an international exchange and had been cautious enough not to proceed when the answers remained insufficient.

Gray wanted those answers too.

That should have been enough motivation by itself.

The problem was that another thought had been sitting beneath the professional ones all day, surfacing every time he looked at the Fish and Drake.

A Dracovish.

A living Pokémon emerging from those fossils, impossible-looking and apparently functional, carrying whatever ancient information the restoration process could still recover.

Possibly a Pokémon that would come home with him.

Gray rubbed his thumb slowly along an old scratch in Bastiodon’s armor. He imagined standing in front of a restoration machine again, except this time he would not be ten years old watching adults make the decisions. He would be the one deciding whether the machine should be turned on at all, responsible for whatever stepped out afterward.

He imagined the doors opening.

He imagined meeting it.

He imagined bringing it back to Sinnoh.

The thought made him smile before he realized he was doing it.

Gray caught himself and glanced around the empty lab as though somebody might have been there to witness the betrayal of his carefully maintained professionalism. Nobody was.

Bastiodon opened one eye.

Gray pointed at him. “Not a word.”

Bastiodon closed the eye again with such deliberate calm that Gray felt judged anyway.

He shut the preservation case, pulled the Galar travel application onto the screen, and began filling out the first page. There were serious scientific reasons to make the trip, enough that he could defend it to the League, his staff, and himself without difficulty.

He told himself it was for research.

That remained true.

It was simply becoming less complete.