"Hmph hmph hmph hmph hmph——"
Okabe Rintaro suddenly started laughing.
"Have you understood something?" Makise Kurisu asked repeatedly, watching his actions.
"Yes, everything is connected," Okabe Rintaro said. "I've found it, the unique answer behind this series of events!"
"Really?"
Okabe Rintaro straightened up, then abruptly pointed at the banana on the table behind him.
"The banana that was pulled off the bunch returned to the bunch! The text message was sent five days ago!"
"How can that be? Could it be…?" Makise Kurisu retreated two steps, perfectly playing along.
"Exactly! This phone microwave (provisional)… " Okabe Rintaro's expression became incredibly joyful. He abruptly stretched his hand towards the Phone Microwave again, loudly declaring his conclusion:
"——It's a Time Machine!"
[Alright, alright, we already knew!]
[It's a Time Machine, otherwise the plot wouldn't make sense!]
[Okabe Rintaro gradually understands everything!]
[Makise Kurisu: Time Machines don't exist!]
[Hahaha, that came back to bite her fast!]
[Okabe Rintaro straightens his back, I told you Time Machines exist!]
[Okabe's smile is too arrogant!]
As Okabe Rintaro reached his conclusion, the short background music abruptly stopped.
The scene first showed Amane Suzuha wiping down and maintaining her bicycle, then returned to the Laboratory.
Okabe Rintaro's big foot was almost in the screen. His phone vibrated repeatedly, waking him from his sleep on the sofa.
Grabbing his phone from the table and waking the screen, he frowned:
"Text messages, 13 of them?"
The sender of the text messages on the screen was, without exception, the same person.
"Shining…"
'Shining Finger'
Okabe Rintaro quickly recalled who the sender was; it was that woman who inexplicably took photos and was looking for the IBN5100.
"Ah, right, I named her Shining Finger."
"But this quantity…" Sending 13 messages in a row was too many, wasn't it?
Casually opening the messages, Okabe Rintaro scrolled through them while reading the text aloud.
"Reply to my message immediately, are you sleeping? How long do you plan to sleep?"
Sighing, he put his phone away, stretched his back, and called out to Hashida Itaru: "Tonz."
"Want to go to 'Sanpo' for food?"
Sanpo was the name of a gyudon restaurant they frequently visited.
However, to his invitation, Hashida Itaru also sighed.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"I'm pretty dejected," Hashida Itaru said. "All-nighter with no results. I regret what I did."
"Why aren't there any more gel bananas?"
"Who knows." Okabe Rintaro sat up from the sofa, scratching his head as he casually said, "Sending text messages also stopped working after that one success."
"It might be better to call Ms. Makise back, right?" Hashida Itaru also said casually.
Okabe Rintaro pouted:
"That's obviously impossible, isn't it?"
As he spoke, Okabe Rintaro fell into a memory.
After he reached his conclusion and excitedly announced that the phone microwave (provisional) was a Time Machine, Makise Kurisu's expression changed.
"No way, a Time Machine is something like that…"
"She said that, ran out, and never came back," he said.
Shaking his head, his hands in his white coat, Okabe Rintaro leaned closer to Hashida Itaru.
Then, he saw an unfamiliar image on the screen in front of Hashida Itaru.
"What's this?"
Silver-blue vacuum beam pipes were encased in precisely arranged niobium-titanium alloy magnet modules, the pipe walls gleaming with the metallic cold light unique to low-temperature superconductors. A pure white light shone through the deep tunnel, illuminating everything around it.
"'LHC'," Hashida Itaru replied. "'Large Hadron Collider,' SERN's elementary particle collider. It's quite soothing."
Looking at the particle collider on the screen, Okabe Rintaro suddenly recalled John Titor's earlier words.
——The Time Machine is monopolized by SERN.
[Whoa, text message bombardment!]
[But are you sure you're not going to reply? In my experience, if you don't reply now, the number of messages will be one digit higher later, you know?]
['In my experience']
[She actually ran away! I thought I'd get to see Assistant make an incredibly embarrassed face and stubbornly insist it wasn't a Time Machine.]
[Assistant, referring to Makise Kurisu? Why call her Assistant?]
[Because I am Okabe Rintaro (not).]
[This is the particle collider, so cool. I think I kind of understand Tonz now, oh no.]
[Admit it, you're all Tonz.]
[SERN is here, John Titor is also coming. Sure enough, things mentioned earlier can't just be dropped; they're starting to pick up on the foreshadowing right away.]
[Is this foreshadowing?]
"…John Titor," Okabe Rintaro whispered the name.
He was only muttering to himself, but Hashida Itaru mistakenly thought he wanted to discuss the name. Following his own understanding, he casually said, "Ah, that guy you mentioned earlier? He's super popular on @channel right now."
"What exactly is SERN?!" Okabe Rintaro's emotions surged again. He abruptly grabbed Hashida Itaru's shoulder and pressed, "Titor said SERN completed the Time Machine in 2034."
Facing his interrogation, Hashida Itaru just pulled a face and retorted, "Meaningless."
"Never mind that, just tell me what SERN is?!" Okabe Rintaro pressed forward abruptly. Seeing his large face close in, Hashida Itaru couldn't help but turn his head to avoid it.
Hashida Itaru forcefully pushed away Okabe Rintaro, who was pressing on his shoulder, then said grumpily:
"So I said, it's short for 'European Organization for Nuclear Research,' headquartered outside Geneva."
As he spoke, he raised his hand to grip the mouse, and a webpage about SERN appeared on the screen.
"As its name suggests, it mainly conducts research in elementary particle physics, so it possesses many world-class facilities."
At the mention of world-class facilities, Hashida Itaru's tone became full of emotion.
"Low Energy Antiproton Ring, Proton Synchrotron, Large Electron-Positron Collider." As he introduced them, his mouse pointer moved to different images on the webpage: "And then, the final BOSS is——the world's number one elementary particle accelerator, the 'Large Hadron Collider'!"
Hashida Itaru's words were full of emotion, as if this particle accelerator was his lover. Even though he was just introducing it, he still poured considerable feeling into it.
"There are rumors that the LHC might create mini black holes depending on how it's used."