"It's not collosal, you're just short."

"I dunno, it's bigger than any of the muggle schools I went to."

She flaps a hand at them dismissively, but smiles while she does it. "Hogwarts is a school for magical children. It's a hidden castle--does it look like it's in ruins to you, or like it's in good repair but the geometry of the hallways doesn't make sense?"

A political stronghold, training facility, and potential trove of ancient weapons, all cloaked from outsiders like him—makes sense; it's the perfect rebel base, really. He wonders idly if the children here are giant-sized as well.

“I saw only ruins, exposed to the elements, before you brought me here. What about the—Inquisitorial Squad, issuing patrols of this area—are they a state-backed police force? A rogue militia? What do they see this place as?”

Harry scoffs at "state-backed police force".

"They're other magic students like us, except Umbridge has appointed them as her enforcers, and if any of them saw you they'd bring you to her in the hope of getting whoever made you in trouble."

Students like—?!…oh, right. Especially among hereditary nobility, “children” can include adult descendants, too, not just youths. Buzz chides himself—why would they even want to arm youngsters with weapons surpassing mortal understanding? “Training camp for adult inheritors" makes so much more sense as a gloss.

“Okay, I see. Is Umbridge a wizard, then? Is this place hidden from her? Also, does her position as commandant come with broader political power? Does she have any authority from or alliance with the current administration—the Ministry?”

"Everyone here is a wizard except you, and yes she works for the Ministry. She and Fudge are trying to prevent anyone from admitting that the dark wizard Voldemort has returned."

"Everyone except you and the elves, but yes."

By the sound of it, Voldemort is presumably some sort of disgraced former bureaucrat in the ruling party: fled the country after a scandal, unwisely came back before the sting had faded from public memory, that kind of thing. Gossip column stuff. Buzz files the factoid away in case it turns out to be relevant—for whatever reason, revolutionaries love to pore over the day-to-day routines and missteps of the aristocracy.

"And what about you? What do you and your faction hope to achieve? You can speak plainly; I know you have grievances with the current administration."

"Oh, y'know, make everyone aware he isn't dead and I'm not a delusional liar, prevent him from taking over magical Britain, get through the year with nobody being murdered. Normal things. Oh, important context, he kidnapped me last June. I survived, obviously."

"That was, what, the fourth time he tried to kill you?"

"Yeah."

"It's so strange explaining this to someone who doesn't know already--Voldemort tried to conquer magical Britain fifteen years ago, killed Harry's parents when he was a baby, tried to kill him but it went wrong somehow and he was disembodied for a while. And still trying to kill Harry. Now he's back, but he isn't attacking openly, and the Ministry wants to believe everything is fine."

Okay, that sounds more like a nefarious villain—possibly even an underling of Zurg, though Buzz dearly hopes the cruel hand of the empire hasn't reached this secluded trove.

To be sure, the story sounds a little dressed up. Never mind the idioms like “disembodied”, “dark wizard”, and “elves”. (And Buzz is absolutely not going to try to unravel all the superstitions and folk understandings of a bunch of warring tribes in possession of transcendental tech—not right away, at least. If their true meaning is relevant, he fully expects it’ll be revealed at appropriate intervals.)

No, the trouble is that these rebels claim to have both an orderly society ruled by popular vote—one they hope to overthrow—and a sensational dynastic struggle involving infanticide, murder, kidnapping, and colonization. They admit that Voldemort’s party controls the Ministry through popular approval and say he’s a brutal tyrant who took power by force. But why, then, was he not arrested for crimes against the state upon his return? To hear the rebels tell it, the government considers him an embarrassment, not a menace to society!

Maybe there’s a little truth in all of it, somehow. Or maybe it’s just self-serving rhetoric from a band of desperate insurgents. That’s people for you, no matter where in the galaxy you go: Everyone's got a struggle. Everyone tells their story as best they can. As a ranger, you learn that the decent thing to do about it costs nothing.

“I’m sorry for your hardship,” Buzz says, and he means it.

The real stakes here are getting actionable intel on this wondertech and a report on the general lay of the land; everything else is just cosmic background.

Big picture, what is he still really missing? Hmmm…Ancient ruins shielded from outsiders and used as training grounds, warring tribes of “wizard” aristocrats, a band of anti-democratic insurrectionists, power struggles with the sitting government—oh.

“Can you tell me about the people who don't have access to magic? Do they tend to sympathize more with the current administration or with groups like yours? And I've been assuming they outnumber people who can use magic—is that right?”

"Muggles don't know that magic exists. Wizards have been hiding their existence for centuries; except for the parents of muggleborn wizard children everyone thinks magic is just a legend. That's why the Ministry might want to wipe your memory--if they decide you're human, then you're a muggle, which means you know too much. And yes, muggles outnumber wizards thousands to one."

Oh, quarks. It was obvious all along, wasn’t it? Buzz has careened the wrong way into another town-with-a-dark-secret scenario.

As insight clears the cosmic dust, he sees the inevitable choice that awaits him: with such reality-altering technology, do you break the secret so that the whole world can enjoy it, or is its destructive power too great for an entire species to wield, grav-bound or not? Is this the reason why the wreckage of Hogwarts lies strewn across the planet’s surface like a monument to hubris?

If the technologies hidden in the bowels of this backwater world would be the ruin of galaxies, then Buzz must not allow them to continue to exist, not even to aid Star Command. So much for a silver bullet in the fight against Zurg— not a single relic could remain for him to return home with.

And what of these mind-wipe devices? There is still so much Buzz doesn’t know. He notes with a prickle of unease that he can’t remember the details of how he arrived on this planet—typical crash-landing retro-amnesia, he had assumed. But what if there’s more to it than that?

Ever since this conversation began, a decision has been ticking away in the back of Buzz’s skull. He makes up his mind.

These rebels may be tendentious, lawless scavengers caught up in a bigger conflict than they know, but they have offered him their shelter and leveled with him about their grievances. He doesn’t buy their patchwork description of reality, and he certainly doesn’t endorse their sedition, but he does believe they intend to be honest, and that they’ll try to help him for as long as he doesn't threaten their cause.

Life demands risk, and he's known far worse allies one could take a gamble on.

“It doesn’t sit right with me,” Buzz says. “To keep muggles in the dark about what their elected officials are doing, or that a privileged few would hoard the dividends of a miraculous art. On the other hand, I’ll be honest: I also think an uprising is a bloody and uncivilized way to try to right the wrongs of your government. If you want to send me on my way knowing I disagree with your principles on this, I’ll go peacefully, and I won’t betray your secret—but it doesn’t seem right not to level with you, given what I’m going to ask you.”

"Wait, are you saying you do want to tell the Muggles about magic, or you don't?"

"Uh. To be clear. You-Know-Who isn't trying to take over wizarding Britain so he can tell the Muggles about magic. He hates muggles. And muggleborns."

"I think even if you don't want to explain what you're planning, you should explain what you think all the people we've told you about want. Because I think you might be wrong about some of them, and I don't want you to get killed because I explained things badly."

“I don’t know.” Buzz admits, looking at Harry. “I can only guess at the extent of your magic’s powers, given what little I’ve seen. It seems they could be used as tools for great prosperity, or weapons of terrible evil. I would say that basic fairness demands that this prosperity, this secret, be shared with the world. A people’s government must not keep secrets from its people. But if that secret knowledge could tear apart this fragile existence—”

Then it would be better to destroy this magic, every last bit of it, than let inequity stand or risk the universe falling to ruin.

“—then I would want to find another way.”

And now the tricky part. Buzz meets the gaze of each of these rebel giants in turn, hoping to communicate some sense of his true intent across the vast and starless gulfs that separate the minds of different species. He knows what he's got to ask; no use orbiting around it.

“Tell me about magic,” he says. “I want to see more of it. I want to understand what you can do with it, what you suspect others can do with it, what people choose to do with it, how far it can reach. I know that I'm an outsider. I know that magical knowledge is at the root of your identity and one of your most precious and closely-guarded secrets on this planet. I’m asking because I want to understand the situation—the danger—we’re in.”

Buzz has found Hermione Granger's one weakness: an earnest request for an explanation of an interesting subject.

"Magic is amazing. Oh wow, where to start--wizarding children generally start doing magic by accident around age five or so, usually when they feel strong emotions, then they get wands at eleven and go to school and learn to control it. Everyone gets a wand that works for them; using someone else's makes everything harder and less reliable. Hogwarts offers classes in Charms, Defense, Herbology, Potions, Transfiguration, Ancient Runes, Arithmancy, Care of Magical Creatures, and Divination, plus some classes that don't involve doing spells directly but are useful context. Some of those are easier to explain than others without getting into the theory side--Transfiguration is the study of changing the nonmagical properties of objects, or to put it another way changing one object into another. Charms is for effects like levitating things or cleaning them or giving objects or people temporary magical properties. Potions is about creating substances, usually liquids, that have magical effects when touched or consumed. Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures are about safely handling and caring for magical plants and animals respectively.  Defense is things like shielding yourself or stunning or disarming opponents, or protecting yourself from dark creatures. Runes is focused on semi-permanently enchanting objects by inscribing magically resonant patterns on them. Arithmancy is mathematics as applied to magic, it's how new spells and item enchantments are designed. Divination is about predicting the future but it's like magic as a whole, you basically have to be born with the talent for it to get anywhere. . . . I feel like I'm forgetting something."