And the door opens and someone who is too old to be a student and too young to be a professor and too winged to be a human walks in from somewhere else entirely.

"- Timothy, nice to meet you, am I off school grounds somehow?"

"What."

"...Timothy Laurence Way, I thought that Hogwarts had decided to shuffle up its study nooks but you don't look like you go to school here."

"...okay, if the idea of naming a school 'Hogwarts' counts for half a point this is two and a half kinds of bewildering." He glances at the exploding stars. "Three."

"You haven't heard of Hogwarts? ...are you from the colonies or something, you have a fascinating accent. And you still haven't introduced yourself -"

"...I have not heard of Hogwarts, I am originally from the United States, and my name is Campbell Mark Swan if we're doing full names."

"Originally? Have I discovered a portal across the Atlantic or not, that would be kind of a big deal."

"...you have not discovered such a portal unless it is more kinds of bewildering. God this is weird."

"Two and a half ways so? Do tell."

"It's probably more ways than that for you if you refer to the States as 'the colonies' unironically, I'm not even sure where to start."

"Hmm. I am a student at Hogwarts, the preeminent - really, the only - wizarding school in Britain; it is a magical castle with staircases that occasionally run different ways on Thursdays, rooms that appear only when you need them, and enough other oddities that when I noticed a classroom was - this - instead I didn't think much of it. The American Muggles did have a war over independence recently, the wizarding world's a bit behind the times -"

"The last time I checked Earth was experiencing the year 2179; I have been away from any ability to verify that for a few years but doubt it went backwards and doubt further that it acquired wizards in so doing."

...blink. 

"...I should get my dad or my little brother in here and you should teach them three hundred years of Muggle science, except it probably won't work in Hogwarts - do you have books or something for it -"

"What is a 'Muggle'? - and I can acquire books."

"People without magic - most people, that is -"

"...I do not think you are from the same Earth as me."

"Magic is secret - has been since the 1600s, there's an international law against doing magic in the presence of Muggles or otherwise permitting them to learn that it exists. But I'd put a lot of money on my ability to end the Statute in the next half-century and it is hard to imagine it'd still be present in - 2179."

"That and magic was de-secreted where I'm from in the early 2000s, and it was less 'wizards' and more 'summon demons to do your bidding'."

"- yep, we don't have that. ...sounds like kind of a bad idea, honestly -"

"Works out okay most of the time."

"Demons don't exist here. There're dragons and merfolk and goblins and vampires and werewolves and banshees and centaurs and elves -"

"Yes, that's another form of bewildering, I know someone who looks and sounds quite like you apart from being an Elf."

"It's uncanny."

"...I'd be an appallingly bad elf."

"Might not be the same kind of elf what with the not the same world thing. My Earth doesn't have Elves, I ran into Elves elsewhere."

"...are all of your elves slaves magically bound to the household their grandparents served in?"

"No, my Elves are tall unreasonably pretty people with pointy ears and brain backups who sing a lot."

"We should pick a different word for those two species, those sound like some important differences there. Brain backups?"

"Quendi for my kind, then. I don't know how to explain the brain backups from a tech background of 'the Revolutionary War was recent'..."

"It's 1802. Uh, what implications does having a brain backup have -"

"They can be brought back from the dead."

"Ooooooooh. Can I have one?"

"Doesn't work for humans and even if it did it's more complicated than that."

"Ah. Okay. What sort of things do I get up to when I am tall and pretty and have pointy ears and sing a lot?"

"Well, when I showed up there was a war on, so that."

"Ah. - is there still in fact a war on, if you don't have any wizards we might be able to help -"

"It's over now."

"Do you want to talk about it -"

"It's not really my fondest ambition but you apparently have magic so I might find it necessary to tell you for context."

"If you wanted magic help with the war I would in fact demand a lot of context. Magic help with reconstruction or something I can do no questions asked."

"Reconstruction is underway. Although you probably can't do the part I'm most hoping to turn up because you were very excited about Elves being able to come back from the dead so that's not customary for wizards."

"It is not. Though if anyone could figure it out it'd be my father."

"Yeah, assuming you're not just a lookalike I'd believe that."

"Does the person who looks like me have six younger brothers?"

"Yes."

"...huh. Anyway, my father's trying to reconstruct the Philosopher's Stone, an old lost piece of magic that does immortality; if he gets that he'll probably try for resurrection next. The Philosopher's Stone has at least been accomplished before; resurrection no one's ever done."

"It'd also have to be a sufficiently generic solution to bring back dubiously material magic god things."

"I mean, we wouldn't want something that's only humans, but we don't have any dubiously material magic god things. ...if they're gods why do they need resurrecting, what kills a god -"

"Anyway, I can ask him. - we're talking decades, if it's achievable, possibly longer, the original person to make a Philosopher's Stone was a hundred and thirty when he finished it -"

"Elves're pretty patient and I'm not even done putting those back yet."

"How many people died?"

"Fifty-five million all told. I can put most of them back."

"I'm glad you can do that."

"Elves." Shrug.

"So, uh, how about those books, Minor's going to get himself expelled by the end of the week but it's probably worth it -"

"It'll take up a lot of room in print, might make more sense to teach you to use a computer."

"Sure, what's that?"

He has his; he pulls it off his belt, turns it on. "Information-handling technology."

"Oooh, cool."

"Yeah. This model requires brain surgery, don't know if wizards have weird brains or anything, probably shouldn't risk it."

"Brain surgery? And I don't know either - we can interbreed with Muggles -"

"Little metal thing in my brain tells the computer what I want it to do. Fantastically convenient, necessary for heavy-duty information security, and if you have a Wizard Cortex or something where your medulla is supposed to be then trying to give you a chip could be all kinds of problematic."

"Okay. Yes, I will decline to be the first test subject for that. It'll be hard to talk my father down from it, though."

"Unless I need to worry about mind control wizardry he doesn't particularly have to agree, and if he's inconvenient about it I'll distract him with a language he doesn't speak or something."

"There's mind control wizardry but my father is not in fact evil. ...distracting him with a language he doesn't speak would totally work."

"Although I don't want to pause too long in the Elf-resurrection I was doing. Someone will wonder what's keeping me any minute and 'looking into otherworldly magic that might get the Maiar back' is a better explanation than 'teaching an alternate universe Fëanáro a language'."

"Fëanáro, huh."

"Yeah. The one who looks like you is named Nelyafinwë Maitimo."

"What about the rest of my family?"

He has notes. He pulls them up. He reads them off. "- don't think anybody ever mentioned the mother's name or if they did I didn't write it."

"...huh. Okay, sorry, I'll let you get back to work - unless I can help somehow -"

"I don't know if you can, all you've mentioned about what wizards do is architectural or speculative."

"Lots of varied and creative ways of doing lethal or nonlethal harm to things, making things, moving things, transfiguring things, divination but it's unreliable, potions, Apparation - huh, I could check if I can Apparate here, if I can that'd suggest it's not in Hogwarts - which the computer maybe suggests anyway -"

"What is Apparition, what sorts of things do potions do, how unreliable, how does the computer suggest that?"

"A few years ago some Muggle scientists came up with this idea called voltaic piles, they work with metal, that's about all I know but my father thought it was a big deal and immediately replicated it and when my little brother was trying to do the same he discovered that whatever physical principles makes voltaic piles possible, it doesn't work within Hogwarts because of the protections laid on the school thousands of years ago. It stands to reason that complicated future Muggle technology is at least fairly likely to stop working in Hogwarts, and it worked fine. Apparition is -" he twists in place and disappears, reappears across the room with a pop. "Potions can make you look like someone else, heal things, shrink things, induce or cure a variety of conditions, let you breathe underwater..."

"...what's the range limit on Apparition?"

"Depends how good you are and how tired you want to be and if you're taking people along but very few people can jump the ocean."

"Ah, damn."

"Where would you want it to go -"

"It wouldn't help with the dead people - well, probably, they're immaterial by default and if teleportation is possible in principle maybe they could be extracted and be just fine? Not sure - but it'd speed up interplanetary travel, if it reached that far which it doesn't."

"Interplanetary -"

"The other you's dad invented faster than light travel."

"I feel like I do not know enough things to appreciate how this is remarkable."

"On my Earth, that has not been invented yet as of 2179. Although there are colonies on the Moon and Mars."

"Ah. Cool. - if a werewolf lived on the Moon - no, you said you don't have any -"

"We do not." He approaches a barstool, apparently having decided that the conversation is going to continue long enough to warrant sitting down. A napkin appears and he blinks at it.

"I didn't get one -" He lifts up his rune charts - "oh, wait, yes, I did, and I didn't see it - oh, sorry, Bar, nice to meet you -"

It's quite all right.

"Are we intruding? What is this place -"

It's called Milliways and you are quite welcome.

"How'd you land on us in particular? Do you know anything about the tall singing Elf who looks like me?"

The door's whereabouts are quite outside my control and I don't believe I'm acquainted with your alt aforementioned.

"All right. I'll have a butterbeer."

Butterbeer appears!

"What an... evocative name for a beverage," says Cam. "I am sort of outside the market for free drinks."

I would be happy to recommend something unfamiliar.

"Okay."

He receives something unfamiliar and evidently likes it.

"Why are you outside the market for drinks, exactly?"

"Because I can make arbitrary material objects."

"...woah."

"It's very convenient."

"Yeah, I bet. Once we get the Statute repealed want to come over and 2179 us?"

"I would really, really like that, but I am not sure how it interacts with putting several million more Elves back and then going to another planet and putting more people back."

"I mean, even if everything goes exactly the way I dream I'm not going to be Minister of Magic until I'm thirty and repealing the Statute'll probably take longer than that."

"I am not sure how you get me to 1802 With Added Wizards in a few years, is my point."

"Oh, do the doors not last?"

"If they do I'm going to have to carve a hole in the wall of my little building to get out to the garden and put Elves in it. Bar?"

The doors do not in fact last.

"Does the alternate universe version of me perchance have people under his command who'd be willing to hang out here full-time such that doors are reliably accessible - does that work, Bar -"

Yes, but unless the door is open to a particular universe time does not pass therein while a patron therefrom is inside.

"...so no one's wondering where I am, yet?"

Correct.

"...huh. Okay, I'm keeping a door on my end at least through N.E.W.T.s."

"And yes, he has lots of people, he's a prince, he sent some along to help acclimate reembodied Elves so I can just do full time resurrection - newts? Are newts an event? Is this like porcine dermatology being a school?"

"They're an abbreviation for Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Test, they're the exams at the end of school and they're a week straight of really exhaustive testing and I can cheat at studying for them so much. ...I should probably check the bylaws to make sure it's not actually considered cheating, I bet they have rules about time-travel but I doubt they prohibit using it to study more between exams..."

"And you have lots of people who will continually hold this door for you?"

"I am not a prince but I could totally convince people to hold a door to a magic room in shifts."

"...well, at any rate you might have trouble keeping access until you're ready to drop 2179 on 1802 With Wizards."

"It would probably be a little bit of a challenge but it'd surprise me a bit if it were insurmountable. Magically hide this wing of the school, have my grandfather kick up a fuss, Slytherins take that kind of thing very seriously and would be meticulously reliable - or I could have an elf do it -"

"Huh."

"Yeah, come to think of it the easiest way would be to tell the administration and then assign some elves, assuming doorstops don't work."

"Incidentally part of it being 2179 normally involves slavery being abolished but maybe the magically bound elves are more complicated somehow."

"It takes that long? - and yeah, elves're more complicated, they were - designed to strongly prefer being slaves and be incredibly distressed at the idea of not having work to do or being such a disappointment to their masters that we'd free them - if you do, they beg you to take it back and then drink themselves to death - someone a long time ago was a monster but abolition wouldn't do much now. We've gone back and forth on the ethics of increasing their population to supplant the human slave trade once the Statute's gone."

"Oh, no, it doesn't take that long," Cam assures him. "In the States it was like, what, fifty, sixty, years off from when you are, I'd have to look it up, and I think the UK beat us to it. The magical elf slaves do indeed sound more complicated."

"Bet even if you don't come 2179 us I can do it in well under fifty. But yeah. All the nonhuman relations are a little tenuous but the Statute's more urgent."

"Oh?"

"Uh, which part? There's recurring debates over whether various races of magical peoples are, in fact, people - also periodic discussion of whether it should be legal to hunt Muggles for sport - killing a werewolf is always self-defense, even if it's not the full moon, whenever the government gets in too much debt they accuse the goblins of usury and there's a war - that kind of thing."

"I mean why is the Statute urgent, although that's also interesting." Notes appear on his computer; he doesn't even have to look at them.

Like a dictation quill but with technology, presumably. "Statute makes it illegal to let Muggles notice we exist - this contributes to the discrimination problems, because anyone who doesn't look standard human can't go out in public - it's enforced with mass memory charms, which are kind of terrible - and it means we can't cure plagues and stuff."

"Memory charms are what they sound like?"

"Yep."

"I am indestructible against all forms of physical harm but might like to test whether that extends to mental harm before coming to 2179 your world."

"Fair enough. What about, like, stunning spells -"

"That would also be good to know."

"I don't know how to cast a memory charm but I would be happy to try other magic if you want."

"If I'm immune to some of it I can probably trust that to hold as a class."

"Probably. There're also protections against a lot of it and while I've never heard of Muggles learning them they don't involve casting spells, you might be able to learn it."

"Plan B."

"Do 2179 humans still age?"

"Yes, but they regularly clear a century."

"Wizards live a lot longer than Muggles. Though maybe you can stack them or something, give my father more time for the Philosopher's Stone -"

"I will not be able to import all of the medical advances because some of them are 'summon an angel and get them to do your bidding' and that might not work where you are."

"Sounds more promising than summoning demons. How do either of those things work, when they do work?"

"Drawing on the floor. There's an extensive safety lecture. If you summon unbound daeva they may go around committing acts of wanton destruction."

"I know to be careful with magic. Drawing what on the floor?"

"Circles. I am qualified to teach the entire university course on the subject but this strikes me as still the 'overview' stage of the conversation."

"Yeah, of course, sorry. You honestly look like you could use a break, we don't have to do all the magic system comparisons right this minute."

"...yeah, with time paused I will probably want to hang out and decompress for a while, it's been - some time, since I took a break."

"Okay. I'll finish my homework, go get some sleep and sweets."

"Enjoy."

"No, no, that was a recommendation - sweets help with Dementors, which have an effect on people similar to the effect, uh, the war had on you."

"...Oh. Sure, why not." He pops a truffle that wasn't there before into his mouth and goes and flops on the couch by the fire.

And he does his homework. "I don't suppose the alternate universe version of me is fetchable?" he asks after a while. "I'd like to meet him."

"On another planet, it'd take five days there and five days back."

"Awww, too bad. You'll just have to tell him I said hi."

"Sure. 'Hey Maitimo the human teenager version of you says hi.'"

"Is he older?"

"In addition to being resurrectable, Elves are immortal by default and also take like five hundred years to even grow up, he's way older."

"...weird.  

- is he married -"

"No."

"Awwww, I could save myself some time and see if we had an alternate universe version of her."

...

He fiddles with his change purse. "Bar, how much do things cost in here?"

Reasonable currency-dependent prices. What can I get for you?

"If money's a limiting factor I can just make whatever if you don't need her recommendations," Cam remarks from where he is supposed to be napping.

"I want to get everyone 2179 birthday presents."

"...and do you know enough about what sorts of things they might want that I can provide or are you going to be relying on Bar for suggestions?"

"I would at least need a partial list of things that exist in 2179, and you are supposed to be resting."

"I don't actually need sleep, you know."

"I will take your word for that but you need something."

Cam sighs and flops more emphatically onto the couch.

And he pulls out a couple of Galleons and asks Bar for birthday present recommendations.

She is happy to provide to the limits of her information about the recipients.

He knows them pretty well, so that will totally do. He ducks out and holds the door to check if computers work in Hogwarts (nope) and whether this breaks them permanently or they start working once removed from the premises again (they do).

He quizzes Bar some more and starts assembling little gift baskets for everyone - there's some gear for zero-gravity games that Fredrick and Theodore will both appreciate, there's a delightful array of exotic foods, there are blueprints, there are plastics, his father and Minor both get radios...

"So if you don't technically need to sleep, when you said you hadn't taken a break -"

Cam sits up and peers over the back of the sofa. "Do you want me to nap or do you want to talk about how unnecessary it is for me to nap."

"Sorry." And he can continue gift-planning with Bar over napkins.

Cam goes back to sleep. Bar is very helpful.

Everyone will get their presents in a smooth chrome basket that no power on Earth could achieve in 1802. He doesn't have enough money to get them for every kid in the school but he asks Bar if she minds if he has Cam duplicate things he bought from her.

Bar does not mind at all. Also she can accept counterfeit.

The goblins would probably not appreciate that if it ever somehow got back to them and everyone is a dick to the goblins so he is trying not to be. But it's good to know anyway, thank you! He plans out on parchment the gift baskets for everyone else in the school.

Cam wakes up after a few hours.

Miranda gets a book on the decline of the British Empire which he is currently annotating heavily, another book that walks one through all the technical calculations involved in going to the Moon, a computer, the Igbo alphabet in the timeline where she didn't invent it, and an account of the transition away from human slaveholding which he will be heavily annotating as soon as he's done with the current one.

"Whatcha writing?"

"Well, now that we've got a timeline to compare to we can probably avoid some mistakes and catastrophes and so on - I'm trying to figure out what the best handling of the next century's events looks like -"

"Wizards don't seem to have affected the course of history?"

"We try really hard to stay out of Muggle events, so that's not as surprising - you had witch-burnings without any actual witches, but even in ours, lots of innocent Muggles were caught up in those..."

"Were yours even in fact witch-prompted? Are witches a separate thing from wizards?"

"Uh, woman are witches, men are wizards, there's no actual difference, at least some witch-burnings were witch-prompted - some people find being burned at the stake hilarious - but I haven't been able to trace down any histories specific enough to identify a divergence - well, not from that subject, there's a little town in Poland where a dragon killed everyone and it looks intact on your maps, but doesn't look to have much affected the course of history -"

"Dragons. Gosh."

"They're pretty cool if you know what you're doing. Most places have reserves, and teams to keep them from flying off and terrifying or murdering Muggles, but - some teams care more about that than others -"

"...and if a dragon gets loose somebody memory charms the Muggles and tells them it was a forest fire?"

"Yup."

"Ugh."

"The Statute is the most selfish, inhumane waste of resources since Azkaban was founded. We're going to get it repealed, though, a lot of people are coming around."

"Azkaban?"

"Wizarding prison."

"...is a selfish inhumane waste of resources?"

"There're these - beings, I don't know if they think - called Dementors. They feed off positive emotions; in their presence it is impossible to feel happy, and with extended time in thier presence impossible to do anything but relive the worst moments of your life, over and over. People convicted or in some cases just accused of crimes go to Azkaban. They usually stop eating and die."

"So, yeah."

"You have a plan for that one too?"

"No, I figured all it really needs is a new paint job.

- containing wizards is a little bit complicated but even without anything from 2179 we have plans in the works."

"What are they?"

"I don't have my notebooks - can you just make them, they're next to my bed and they're green and they literally say 'plans for world domination' on the cover -"

"Are your notebooks inherently magical in some way?"

"...well, I don't want random people to be able to read the world domination plans..."

"I can't make magic stuff."

"Oh. Sorry." Door - "Accio notebooks -"

"They'll probably be a minute, someone'll have to let them out of the common room."

"They have to travel through not only the intervening space but a clear trajectory through it? How do they pathfind?"

"Magic. I think my father checked once, they pretty much try to go directly at you and nose around if they run into obstacles, they can in fact get stuck even if there's a path to you if there're specific traversibility properties -"

"Aww, nosing books."

"Common room's always full of people, someone'll let them out for me."

Cam awaits the approach of books.

Books! He flips them open to the section on criminal justice reform! "I guess I should summarize current procedures so all of this makes sense - most law enforcement in Britain is done by the Ministry of Magic, which has a bunch of somewhat autonomous departments which enforce laws under their own purview. Things that'd warrant a sentence in Azkaban are usually heard by the Wizengamot, a gathering of around eighty preeminent and elderly wizards from families of political importance - seats are inherited -"

"Of course they are."

"I am deriving a lot of satisfaction from how the future apparently considers all the things I personally dislike to be abhorrently primitive."

"Bar give you a future history lesson?"

"Hasn't been time for a very thorough one but I picked out books for people who'll be good at implementing them and I flipped through them to see if they covered the bits we'll need."

"What other personally disliked primitivenesses turned up?"

"Slavery gets abolished, non-property-owners get to vote, wizards're actually better than Muggles on women being allowed to own property and so on but the Muggles get there too, adversarial justice systems instead of 'the accused can speak in their defense if they want', my little brother Aaron has strong feelings about financial systems and is going to be outright gleeful at the idea of fiat currency..."

"Wait, has fiat currency not been invented yet in 1802 -?"

He gestures at the fat gold coins he had out to pay Bar for the goodies. "Muggles some places have it, backed by gold or silver in their reserves..."

"I suppose wizards might have an easier time counterfeiting but then I'd also expect you to have an easy time conjuring up all the gold you found convenient to have, naively I'd expect IOUs to hold up better because you can go ask somebody 'this says you owed so-and-so this amount for this thing, is that true'..."

"Goblins are really strict on counterfeiting, and there're spells to check, and it's a small enough community you couldn't get away with it for very long..."

"What're goblins like?"

"Uh, short, wrinkly, greyish skin, long pointy ears, long history of wars with wizards which even having only read our side of the story were probably mostly our fault, run Britain's major wizarding bank..."

"That sounds... tense."

"A bit. I wouldn't have files and files on how to run the world if it was running itself well enough."

"Suppose not." Pause. "To answer your earlier question, no I have not done anything except reembody Elves for several months before finding this place."

"Well.

Want to help me revise plans for running the world in light of lots and lots of evidence on what works apparently already existing? It sounds like more fun than months and months of reembodying Elves and I take it it doesn't even slow the return of the Elves to life. 

- what happened -"

"There was a war."

Pause.

"I suppose it would be inappropriate to take you up on your invitation to go modernize your world without telling you that they died because I destroyed their planet."

"Why?"

"The war was against an evil god - who could make binding oaths, that I could verify - who really really wanted it destroyed - and. Needed to stop doing what he was doing."

"And you can bring them back."

"I can bring the Elves back."

"There were other peoples -"

"You wanted to know what kills a god."

"I hope it was worth it."

"Was or I wouldn't've done it."

Nod. "None of this affects how good it would be to have future hospitals and so on, so if you want to come give us future stuff you can still do that. Though we should make really sure you're either protected against magic mind control or just nowhere near any wizards at any time."

"You're a wizard."

"And apparently could make you destroy the world, objectively you shouldn't trust me that much."

"If you point your stick at me unexpectedly we might have a problem."

"Fair.

So, did the evil god keep his end of the deal?"

"Yes."

"I would like more information but it doesn't need to be now or in the format of a conversation."

"I have the oath we got out of him written out if you want to see. It's very thorough and refers to a lot of evil things you'd probably need more context on the brain backups to get."

"That and the - absence of other solutions -"

Cam makes him a copy of the oath.

And he reads, and occasionally asks for clarification on what servers and simulations and backups are.

"People can be - rendered as - information. You can sort of put them on pause and then they don't change or have any experiences - that's what happens to an Elf if their body dies but the chip is fine. Keep them around as static records in case something happens to a copy you're messing with, backed up. You can 'run' them - that's what servers are for - the body's unnecessary, you can with the right stuff interact directly with the information, give it whatever experiences you want, much faster than normal. Duplicate it, run two or more of the same person at the same time. Edit it, fuck around with memories or anything else you know enough about to change precisely."

"...that's terrifying."

"Yes."

Read read. 

"Okay. You did the right thing, if you want confirmation of that from teenagers from the 1800s."

"Your alt thinks so too. Helped with it."

He flinches slightly.

"Makes sense to have more eyes on it."

"Yeah."

"Speaking of which offer stands to look at the taking-over-the-world notes and go "oh they tried that in the 2060s and it doesn't work as well as you'd think" or whatever."

"Thanks."

Investigation of notes commences.

They are really thorough and exhaustive! Here is a glossary of every single person of influence in magical Britain and how well he knows them and which projects he could trust them on and avenues to reduce or increase their influence or his influence over them, updated after regular holiday parties and with notes about frequency of personal correspondence (he is talking to everybody, all the time). There are forty pages on Ministerial reorganization. There are three full notebooks on the Statute and the international conference that would need to be held to overturn it and the people he is in the process of persuading to hold that conference and proposed timelines and their drawbacks. There are eight pages devoted to prospects for marriage and their political advantages and disadvantages.

And then there are plans for once the Statute is repealed and he is Minister of Magic: infrastructure, research, governance, Muggle-magic relations, goblin relations, centaur relations, werewolf regulations, merpeople regulations, international conventions for dragon handling, potential things to do about the human slave trade, potential things to do about the Muggle colonial holdings in Africa -

"I can have less meaningful future knowledge on things like centaurs, although I can extrapolate a little bit from daeva."

"There's a notebook for Muggle governance stuff in particular, if you want to confine yourself to that, or I'll take centaur-daeva parallels."

"Might be more efficient to give you a book on Revelation and take questions, since there are only three kinds of daeva and that's faster than teaching me about all these things." Book.

"Thanks." He starts reading.

And Cam takes notes and writes in suggestions and cautions on all the Muggle stuff.

"Thank you. - you doing okay?"

"In what sense?"

"Uh, spending the next however-long being sad seems worse than not doing that?"

"It isn't - useful, but it seems appropriate."

"My world really really sucks and I guess it would be appropriate to be sad about it all the time but. I don't know."

"I'm not like this about things I didn't do."

"It was the right thing to do. The - awful - is all located in the situation in the first place."

"I murdered fifty-five million innocent bystanders, only most of whom I can bring back. Their planet had some magical properties I couldn't replicate when I made them a replacement planet and the ecosystem's going to be shot because I can't put most of the animals back smart enough to walk and breathe at the same time and they were post-scarcity because of the intervention of the magic god things which are now dead and staying that way and I can't resume any pregnancies that were interrupted after a few weeks and before the chips were fully formed and Elves are fanatical about that, I have heard the most absolutely heartbroken crying about people's babies - yesterday a little girl wanted to know if I could get her dog and I cannot get her dog - it is not appropriate to whistle while I work."

 "- can you - put the pregnancy-as-it-was-at-a-few-weeks -"

"Yeah. The helpers your alt sent with me are gonna ask when people are slightly less shellshocked if that's an acceptable facsimile. Didn't want to spring it on anyone."

"Muggle England has a child mortality rate of 30%".

"And I will be eager to come through your door and modernize your planet and eradicate malaria which at a generous estimate may be responsible for as many as half of all human deaths to date where you're from, and then follow up with the thousand next best interventions, and I will do coffee instead of sleep for that too, and first I am going to put all the Elves back - they really do have inhuman levels of baby-obsession - and it would not. Be. Appropriate. To be cheerful. While I have not even undone the murders I can undo."

"And you're not going to - burn out, or -"

"Don't get me wrong, as long as time is paused there I will take advantage of that, but no, I was not planning to burn out and I expected to be able to follow through on that."

"How long is it going to take?"

"Few more months for this planet. Putting the war casualties back will be a few more beyond that. Might lay down some infrastructure too."

"And how long have you been at it -"

"Months. I'm fast but there are so many."

"You are fast, that's - wow, like 10,000 an hour."

"I figured out what order to do them in on the way there. Make 'em in batches."

"Okay. Let me know if you need anything we can do."

"Recommend me some books about what you can do, maybe there's something you take for granted that'd be useful even if it wouldn't solve the central problem?"

"Uh, sure, Gamp's Fundamental Limits On Transfiguration, Keddles's Charms For Household Use and her Charms For Hobbyists, Ketteridge's Garden Guide To Magical Plants and Marjoribanks's Herbology, Third Edition - fourth edition's better if you happen to read French -"

"I do. Perks of being a daeva, we cheat at languages." Stack of books.

"Lucky you! Uh, Strougler in An Enchanter's Overview, Hipworth's Potions for the 19th Century, Alderton in Duelist's Guide. That should at least mention most spells and give some clue as to what there's promise for in future development."

More stack. "Thanks. You occupied or should I give you some books too?"

"I would love book recommendations from the future, my runes homework can really kind of wait."

"Inconveniently much of my education was aimed at demons and assumes the ability to create arbitrary material objects but I should be able to come up with some things that don't..." And presently Timothy has a stack of his own, medicine and electrical engineering and computer science and such.

"Thanks. ...do you mind if I use a dictation quill to take notes, I can make it so you can't hear me speaking to it but some people find that annoying in its own right."

"Won't bother me."

Silencing charm! Very very long letter to his father! And he settles in and starts reading.

Cam asks Bar for a meal recommendation, which he buys with counterfeit and eats while he works.

The future has lots of stuff and he has absolutely no scientific education. This is very interesting reading.

"Do go ahead and ask if something is too void of context."

"I've just been presenting it all to my father as a puzzle, I bet there is enough context and it's just that I'm not good enough with it and he'll be able to come up with an explanation."

"I will be very surprised if Introduction to Concepts of Programming published in 2038 has enough context for people in 1802 who are not personally Charles Babbage. Maybe not even him, when was he -" Looks it up. "He's currently thirteen in your world, so likely not even him."

"I will tell him that you said that and then he will try twice as hard. Might still be beyond him, I don't know, but there's also enough here that I'm not in a hurry to get to Introduction to Concepts of Programming either."

"Well, there's 'information-theoretically possible to extract value from' and 'enough'."

"Okay, okay, what is programming and why would Charles Babbage be able to do it."

"He invented the concept. Maybe unless you count Jacquard, who may have done his bit already, but Babbage is more directly relevant to computers. Programming is how you get computers to do things that are not 'sit there' and 'inefficiently heat the room'."

"And computers are your little stick thing -"

"Computers start as monstrosities that take up entire rooms and can barely add two-digit numbers. Eventually they are my stick thing that obeys my thoughts and is cryptographically secure against demons and can hold more writing than the entire human race has as of 1802 produced."

"- wow -"

"I'm fond of my stick thing."

"I bet. Any guesses as to why they don't work in Hogwarts -"

"Are there other things that likewise won't?"

"There's the thing Minor's constantly toying with - with the voltaic piles - he got electric eels in to check if they worked, they work fine, so it's something else going wrong with voltaic piles -"

"Brains work on electricity too, so it can't be electricity generically, eels or no eels. I suppose wizard brains might run on magic, so the eels rule out 'wizards are the only organisms with brains to set foot on the grounds'... metaphorical feet..."

"There're wards to stop Muggles from coming to Hogwarts but I don't think they'd die if they did. I could fetch Minor, ask if he's gotten anywhere on the theories."

"If you have sparrows on the grounds - nonmagical ones, I mean - then electricity generically is not the thing. And lightning, do you have that."

"We have both lightning and sparrows."

"So orderly inorganic electricity, or something. Does clockwork behave?"

"I have never heard complaints about it misbehaving and there are five Ravenclaws in the family."

"I don't know what a Ravenclaw is, except in the uninformative orinthological sense."

"Students at Hogwarts are, at the age of eleven, sorted into one of the four Houses by a magic hat that reads your personality and places you accordingly. The houses are Slytherin, the house of ambition and cunning, Ravenclaw, the house for the love of knowledge for its own sake, Hufflepuff, the house for the classic virtues - perseverance, hard work, justness - and Gryffindor, for bravery and passion."

"That sounds like an interesting sociology experiment except for the involvement of the magic hat."

"There're real personality differences. Everyone knew my father'd be a Ravenclaw by the time he was three, and I am told it became obvious I was a Slytherin around the same age, though when I was six I heard that most Ministers of Magic have been Hufflepuffs and started pretending to be driven by hard work, justness, and so on - fooled some people, did not fool the hat -"

"...that is adorable."

"Know alternate universe versions of anyone else well enough to guess their houses?"

"I don't think I'll award myself any points for figuring that the one of your brothers who at least in Elf form is named rather presciently after his dad is a Ravenclaw too?"

"That's Minor. And yes, he is."

"Do people literally name children 'Minor' in your era?"

"...yes? Is that something future people find objectionable."

"It's not a serious social controversy or anything but it is deeply unfashionable. Your name ages pretty well and does not call into question whether you will experience paradox upon reaching the age of majority."

"Timothy, Michael, Theodore, Aaron, Minor, James, Samuel."

"James is a girl's name now."

"...huh. And no special resemblance to the lookalikes' names - it is more than just lookalikes, really, isn't it -"

"Name resemblance - exists? It is not overwhelming. And I thought that was clear at this point."

"I am struggling to think of explanations, but - yeah, does sound like it. Anyway, Michael's a Slytherin with me, Theodore's a Gryffindor, Aaron and Minor and Samuel are Ravenclaws, James is a Hufflepuff - twins don't usually split, they were a little disappointed - my parents were both Ravenclaws -"

"I am not closely socially acquainted with the Elf versions but all right."

"- the war, or -"

"The war. They seemed like nice enough people, we had a good working relationship."

"Maybe once everything is resolved I will go check in on them. I sort of doubt they're okay and - maybe it'd help if they were needed to fix my world."

"Maybe."

Reading! "Can I have my notebooks back to copy them really quickly, I want to make some edits -"

"Yeah." Cam shoves them across the bar surface. "The ruminating on who to marry is startlingly unromantic; 2179 frowns on mixing politics and marital status. I don't actually know how Elves feel about it."

"If you got rid of all the hereditary titles you could probably mostly stifle political marriages but I can't imagine there'd stop being practical ones."

"Admittedly the case - though a lot less so post-scarcity, much less tempting to marry for money at that point - but it's customary to at least heavily frost the decisionmaking process with at least a pretense of affection."

"Once I pick someone I'll court her, I just - can't seem to grasp the appeal of using feelings to choose someone instead of developing them for someone you chose."

"I suppose that's pragmatic" and also totally a cover but in 1802 some people don't know yet when they're seventeen probably and maybe it doesn't actually match.

He taps his notebooks a couple times - "Okay, I think they should now count as Not Magic, and you'd be faster at copying them than I would, want to try -"

Notebooks?

Notebooks!

"Thank you!" Tap tap tap and he hands them back over and starts annotating the copies.

And commentary on world domination ensues.

Eventually he is hungry.

He may avail himself of either the bar or the demon but neither reads minds.

"I may have spent all my money on presents for the whole school, can you do a snack?"

"Sure, what do you want?"

"What do they eat in 2179?"

"Eating meat that used to be an animal is frowned upon, and there is a global trade in fruit and spices and stuff, but nothing's jumping out at me as intro to 2179 cuisine..."

"There's meat that didn't used to be an animal? Or do you just mean 'conjured'-"

"Conjured or grown in a vat."

"Huh. Uh, I'm not picky - I can also have someone hold the door and head down to the kitchens and grab something -"

"How about pizza," suggests Cam, handing him a plate. He makes one for himself, demonstrates how to eat it.

Pizza is weird. He likes pizza. "Wow. Thank you."