"You're going to love this," Seungyoun promised as he set the heavy clothing bag down in front of Wooyoung. They stood at the giant round table in the preparation room before decontamination and discussed the last arrangements before Wooyoung would be on his way to Babylon. Today, they also spoke in Akkadian, just to test his skill in the language once more.

Wooyoung had already said goodbye to Yongguk in the morning (also in Akkadian). Neither of them knew how long it would take Wooyoung to return or if he would be successful, but both of them had nodded at each other confidently when he had left. With determination making his eyes gleam, Wooyoung had met up with Seungyoun to add the finishing touches.

"Did you make it yourself?"

"I needed help this time. But the tailor understood quickly when I showed her a drawing. Here it is, in its full beauty!" Ceremoniously, he unzipped the bag and pulled out the neatly folded fabric. The knee-length tunic was made of soft cotton in a warm beige suiting Wooyoung's skin. With it came a deep purple shawl with golden fringed linings that would wrap around his body. Last, Seungyoun pulled out a modest leather belt and matching sandals.

"Behold!" The ginger-haired man giggled as Wooyoung clapped in awe. What would look like a silly Halloween costume for most people around him was a working uniform for him, and Wooyoung adored its style. Swiftly, he undressed so Seungyoun could help him put everything on and fix it into place. When Wooyoung twisted and turned in front of his friend moments later, Seungyoun snapped a few pictures to show him how great the clothes looked on Wooyoung. Huddled over the phone, both of them gushed about its historical accuracy.

With a frown, Wooyoung glanced at his barely hairy legs. He hoped that being hairy wasn't a sign of manliness or rank in that culture.

"Ah, you will seduce everyone who will come across you. Do I have to come with you to be your chaperone?" Seungyoun pretended to faint as he leaned against the table. His smirk had Wooyoung kick him in the shin with barely any force.

"Hell no, idiot. One of us will already stick out like a sore thumb. You do your job while I take the next tremendous step for humanity."

"Yeah, just exclude me from your important projects, it's alright. At least put me down as the costume designer in your speech for your Nobel Prize," Seungyoun said with a roll of his eyes. Wooyoung pushed his hair back. He wore none of his beloved accessories today since they would have demanded attention back in the fifth century before the Romans nailed that poor dude on a cross. He missed the comforting weight of the silver already.

"Depends if you're good. If you keep being mean, I don't want you to be affiliated with my name," Wooyoung retorted, flicking his hair. As they snickered among themselves, they pushed off their corner to walk over to decontamination.

"Take care, though. You should visit the gardens and take a leaf or two for me as souvenirs, but don't get caught up with slave traders. They like pretty boys like you." When Seungyoun extended a hand to brush his fingers over Wooyoung's cheek, Wooyoung snapped at him with his teeth. Seungyoun's batting eyelashes settled into a frown.

"Stop. You're trying to flirt to get into the autobiography of the next big fish in science. Don't you dare."

They laughed it off, but Wooyoung took his advice to heart. He had run-ins with slave traders before and they were ghastly folks. None of which Wooyoung wanted to associate himself with.

Leaned against the carved wood of the door leading into the past, Wooyoung lingered another moment. When Seungyoun said goodbye to him, actual worry contorted his lips into a pout. Wooyoung assured him he would be back soon. Then he left the man behind to dip into the next room.

Decontamination was an annoying, but necessary task. As hundreds of expensive disinfection molecules floated around Wooyoung to bite at his skin and settle in his clothes, they pulled all the modern germs from him that the people of the past wouldn't survive catching. Wooyoung had done a medical exam, too, before coming here to ensure that he wouldn't carry any disease over two thousand years into the past and infect the Babylonians with it.

Muttering his most relevant Akkadian phrases under his breath, Wooyoung proceeded once the cleansing process was over. He felt clinically clean and scentless. The lack of his protective germs and the human scent always irritated him for a minute before his body hurried to replenish his natural oils. Once he stepped towards the pillar in the middle of the room, he already felt better.

The slap of his sandals echoed in the glass dome that decorated the tower. Not a single piece of furniture or a single object that could contaminate him again was in the room. Only the clinically clean pillar with its socket that held their time travel machine.

Wooyoung picked up a remote for his way back and slipped it under his clothing. Bearing it would connect him to the time machine and locate him as the traveller for his way back and forth into the past. Back when he had first started the job, he had wondered whether a person in the past could pick up the remote and travel here on accident, but the machine could identify who it was who carried the remote. Rule 2 applied. Wooyoung was allowed to go back home, but any other person from Babylon would travel to the future, which wasn't possible. The remote was useless to them.

Wooyoung remembered the coordinates for his landing spot and the exact date Yongguk had picked for him by heart. It would be a sweltering hot summer in Babylon once he arrived, and the gardens would be in full bloom. Just a few years before Neo-Babylon would once more fall, this time forever under the Persian Empire.

As his fingers flicked the intricate mechanisms of the machine into place, Wooyoung took a last deep breath. The activation button did nothing more than start a low hum in the machine that showed it was active. It was as inconspicuous as a TV, but so much more powerful.

Wooyoung rounded the pillar to reach the second door with reverent slowness. Once more, he went through his list of tasks mentally. Find Song Mingi. Get the records of immortality from one of the first advanced civilisations recorded in the world. Not fall into the hands of slave traders and collect some leaves for Seungyoun.

With another snicker that relieved some of the anxiety curling in his belly, Wooyoung opened the door. The moment he walked on through, his sandals lost footing of the year 2087. His next step brought him back into 582.

Wooyoung had the habit of closing his eyes during the jump. He had been taught to focus on his body rather than his surroundings and abort the mission immediately if he felt anything more than a gentle tug of gravity in his stomach. He knew the surrounding view had shifted at a speed faster than his human eye could track.

When Wooyoung lifted his eyes shyly, he found himself in an area unlike any he had ever seen before.

He had stepped outside of a small rectangular building into the dusty spread of a desert. Golden like the sun, the sandy flats spread until the horizon to blend into the bright blue sky in the flickering air. The occasional palm trees that interrupted the dry ground reached for the skies and spent the barest bit of shadow under the sweltering sun.

Wooyoung's sandals stood among a shadowed outline, but he already felt the touch of sand grains upon his skin when the warm desert breeze carried them up to his ankles.

With a hand shielding his eyes from the sun, Wooyoung looked around in awe. The street at his side bustled with a constant stream of merchants that travelled towards and from the mighty gate in the city walls. Countless feet shuffled up the sand and the groups conversed with each other in their melodious language. Wooyoung's heart yearned to mingle with them, to touch the soft fur of the loyal donkeys that pulled rattling carts with ware to sell.

When Wooyoung stepped among the colourfully clothed folks, he got swept with their current like a fish in the water. His feet matched the pace of people dead for millennia. He strained his ears to pick up what they were talking about. The merchants consisted mostly of men, but some had women and children with them to help with their business. They carried clay pots under their arms as they cheerfully chatted away. Their dark skin glistened under the unforgiving sun, making them glow with health and naturalness.

Caught in awe, Wooyoung let himself be dragged along as he fixated his gaze up ahead. The dirt street was flanked by two tall walls made of dashing blue bricks that created merlons in regular intervals to dot the street with both sun and shadow. Their size compared to how much they narrowed the crowd in was claustrophobic, but Wooyoung regarded them with awe as he flooded between the warm surfaces with the rest of the voyagers.

Wooyoung was thirsty already. His clothes allowed the air to cool his sweaty skin effortlessly, but the sun sucked his life force straight out of him. While distracted by his astonishment over the ancient civilisation that was vivid and bustling around Wooyoung, his thirst scratched in his parched throat.

The long pathway led the group to the intimidating and towering main walls of the city. Behind the even grander city wall that had the same colour as the desert loomed the shadow of a tall building - a palace, as Wooyoung guessed. The only connection between both walls were the infamous gates: the smaller Ishtar gate, and the taller Sin gate. Both loomed behind each other with their entrances gaping open as people passed the intimidating maw unbothered.

The stark blue bricks of the gates were painted with animals. Golden and white, they stood out on the wall in perfect symmetry and paraded all in the city's direction to face toward the palace and the mighty ruler residing in it. Wooyoung saw horses and goats and lions. He wanted to linger and look at them closer to find out if they actually had an eagle's claws or cats' heads, but the flux of bodies smoothly propelled him through the two gates.

Once past the inner walls, the crowd dispersed like a broken crumb of bread. Most of them directed their shuffling steps at the bazaar, others dipped into the alleys between identical rectangular buildings that looked to be made of sand.

The largest building in the entire city far in the east where the sun would break its rays around its tall walls in the morning was the ziggurat built for the gods: the Etemenanki, or as biblically famous, the Tower of Babel. The stepped tower for worship stood out with its intricate decorations and symmetry to show many years of devotion that went into the building process.

Wooyoung had to stand aside from the road to stare at it in all of its glory for a while. He wondered if he would be allowed to climb its stairs that seemed to lead into the heavens and the gods' cradle. From what he had learned, it was a major religious place and not to be taken lightly after several demolitions and resurrections. Its height was nauseating for a building of its time and Wooyoung's mouth ran dry at the imagination of how much hard work it must have taken to build a tower as tall as a skyscraper without modern machines. He didn't doubt that walking the massive main staircase leading from the ground all to the elevated entrance of the tower would make him feel like a king. Small like ants, the guards on the tower dotted the structure.

Astonished, Wooyoung blinked against the sun and looked around some more.

To his right and along the canal system that fed the entire city with fresh water from the river down south was another row of walls. These ones were guarded by men with heavy spears at the entrance. Undoubtedly, the pathway to the palace.

Wooyoung had no incentive on how to find Song Mingi. He only knew that the other man worked for the royal court. Before appearing suspicious to the guards, however, he would rather ask around in the city first and look around. The smell of exotic fruit and food he had never tried before that wafted from further down the major streets drew him in and begged him to take a taste that most people of his time would never experience.

With slow steps, Wooyoung strolled down the well-guarded roads and drank all the sights around him up. No words he could write could describe the beauty of the unscathed lion statues littering the corners, the deep tint of purple that the people's clothing had, and the way the sun bathed the city in gold. In the middle of the most legendary and unexplored world towns of ancient history and massively out of place, Wooyoung blended in unnoticed to explore the city and its secrets.