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"Tezuka!" Inui's eyebrow twitched.
"Inui." Tezuka kept his own eyebrows carefully neutral. Also his face. And voice. If Inui hadn't told him once that a healthy human body is slightly alkaline, Tezuka would have made sure he was pH neutral as well.
"You--" More twitching. "Your match." Inui added a grimace to the twitching.
"Raise both arms above your head, Inui," Tezuka said, neutrally.
"That winner you hit...my arms? What?"
"I think you might be having a stroke."
"If I'm not, I should be," Inui said. "Do you realize what you've done?"
"Thank you."
"I wasn't congratulating you!" Inui actually did throw his arms in the air and Tezuka had a very hard time not smiling.
"I'm sure you can find a video of the match."
"It's not the data," Inui said, but his expression changed. "Maybe if I put a note on the purser's office..." Then he shook his head. "Quit changing the subject."
Tezuka just looked at Inui. Which often, for reasons he had never quite figured out, made him feel quite non-neutral.
"You meddled with space and time, Teuzka. You changed history."
"And?"
"And they're gone, Tezuka. The dinosaurs. They're gone." Inui pushed his glasses up, which gave Tezuka an extremely non-neutral feeling somewhere inside of him. Well, okay, in the groin area. Which was hard to keep in a neutral state sometimes.
Tezuka raised his racquet into a somewhat camouflaging position. He thought about what Inui had said and decided that it was okay to raise his eyebrows at the news. "But you still have your ankylosaurus phone charm."
"The real dinosaurs are gone. My triceratops leather jacket? It's made from cows now. The velociraptor strips I was going to have for lunch are chicken now! Which tastes terrible with barbeque sauce, by the way."
"Are you sure?"
"I checked Wikipedia. It's all there: 66 million years ago, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. It was a mass extinction, Tezuka." Inui rubbed his forehead. "Three quarters of all plant and animal life on earth, wiped out. By you."
"Sorry."
"I updated the page to explain what really happened but someone keeps reverting my changes. And worst of all?" Inui said. "The xixianykus I bought Kaidoh disappeared and now he thinks I forgot his birthday. So he dumped me!"
There it was. Tezuka put his hand on Inui's shoulder. It was warm and nice and Tezuka thought maybe neutrality was overrated. Definitely his groin thought so.
"And how are we going to get back home? We were supposed to fly our pteranodons!"
"Everything will work out, Inui." Tezuka dropped his racquet and stepped closer. Inui smelled like hard work and salt air and barbeque sauce.
"Well, maybe we can fly back on Fuji's unicorn."
"Maybe not," Tezuka said and pushed Inui back into his cabin.