"Brooms, 'Mione. Everyone learns to fly on a broom at eleven."

"Right, yes, flying," she says, turning slightly pink. "And next year we'll learn how to apparate--that's disappearing from one place and appearing instantaneously in another."

Buzz is surprised—and rather touched—that these sorcerers would share their tribe’s privileged secret arts with a traveler from another world. With a practiced ear, he attempts to absorb the impromptu lecture as a whole—not snagging on the details, but trying to perceive the general structure, the crucial elements, the surprise.

“I’m grateful.” he says, looking thoughtful. “I have a few questions that I expect are more basic than you’re used to thinking about. They may even sound funny or nonsensical, which is just fine. Answer whatever you feel comfortable with.”

“First, how far and how fast can your magic go—can your will affect things that are farther away than you can see, for example? Second, what is the greatest scale of destruction you can imagine a single determined person being capable of with magic as an aid—can your magic be used to kill? Third, how much overlap is there between the magical expertise or magical tools different people have available? Do you think other people know different magic than you do? Do you know of any other magical devices besides wands, brooms, and Hogwarts? Fourth, what happens to a person's wand when they die?”

"Someone could apparate or portkey farther than they can see, but not affect things that far away without going there first. They could drop an object or cast a spell and then apparate away, maybe. People in different countries learn different ways of doing things but it's mostly the same things? Flying carpets instead of brooms, different runic alphabets, that sort of thing. There are more kinds of magical device than I could possibly list, but Hogwarts is one of the greatest in the world. Dead wizards and witches are usually buried with their wands, but sometimes they're passed on to descendants-using a relative's wand doesn't work as well as a new wand but usually better than a stranger's."

"And--Magic can be used to kill, yes. I think if someone tried very hard and was very clever they could kill a lot of people at once. Fewer than the worst muggle weapons but still a lot. And there are certain magical creatures that are even more dangerous, but too stupid to be more dangerous than a dark wizard on their own and nearly impossible to control."

". . . Are you wrong about dark wizards or am I wrong about muggle weapons?"

"Second thing."

Well, that’s one relief—this unearthed technology hasn’t surpassed the weapons they’ve managed to develop on their own. In fact, it sounds like they mostly use it for holograms, shields, antigravity, and teleportation—and Buzz, for one, won’t be giving them any more ideas. Just think of how Hermione reshaped a scrap of paper at a molecular level, with no apparent effort!

Kind of a surprise that they bury their wands, though: burying the dead is fairly common in grav-bound species, including with sentimental or powerful objects, but Buzz had assumed that their high-powered heirlooms would be too rare and costly to give up, and too important for their noble lie. (In retrospect, this was a little foolish: with enough books, a society could maintain the illusion that literacy requires noble blood without depending on physical hand-me-downs; why shouldn't these giants do the same with magical skill?)

Notably, this does raise the possibility that he could recover an armload of decommissioned wands from some burial site. While he expects there's a taboo, the difference between grave robbing and respectable archaeology is often a matter of timing. Buzz files the idea away for later consideration.

One more danger to understand then. “And mind wiping? How does it work? Is there a way to detect whether it’s been done?”

"It can do either a span of time up to the moment of obliviation, generally not extending back further than a few minutes, or all the memories of a particular subject--or, in a few rather horrible cases, all of someone's memories entirely."

(Sympathetic glance at Ron.)

"In generally causes a minute of disorientation, and can be done to an unconscious subject, but careful introspection will be enough to detect it in most cases unless the caster is very skilled and implants false memories to cover the gaps."

So the price of failure is his mind — to forget, and be forgotten, in the ruins of a strange land, never to complete another mission. If it would mean abandoning my duty as a ranger, Buzz thinks to himself, it’d be better to be destroyed outright!

It's a sobering prospect. No use dreading it, though. After all, I still live—and I know who I am. I’m Buzz Lightyear of Star Command!

“Well, I definitely haven’t lost all my memories, but I am experiencing some retroamnesia. Based on your report, there's a chance this may be more than just the aftereffects of an emergency landing. It may be that I discovered something…some secret knowledge, perhaps…that my enemies did not want known. I wonder whether I've been on this world for longer than I realize. Perhaps far longer. Captured and mind-wiped, but not destroyed, if this is your planet’s custom.”

I should get my bearings, Buzz realizes. I need to confirm where and when I am.

A quick poke at his suit's astrolocator — unresponsive. Yeah, figures. Presumably if the suit could do deuterium beacon orientation, its subspace radio would also work. It'll have to be manual fallback, then.

“Say—you talk familiarly about the existence of other planets, even if you haven't contacted them. Does this mean your people have pierced the veil of clouds that surrounds this world? I don’t expect I’ll be going anywhere soon, but I’d like some idea of where I am, and a star chart might help.”

She has a star chart! A whole sheaf of them, actually, neatly labeled and cross-indexed. She can even shrink them down to a reasonable size for Buzz to hold.

Harry, meanwhile, has been glancing at something in his bag every thirty seconds, and now he looks up. "This is our best window for getting out of here without getting caught. You can probably stay here as long as you want, but we need to get to bed before curfew." Not strictly true, but he doesn't want Lightyear to know about the cloak.

A curfew—on what grounds? Military raids? Storms? Political unrest? Those civic details are driven from his mind as his eyes dart across the topmost star sheet.

Alien diagram conventions, but they’re readable! Buzz thumbs through the neatly indexed stack, feeling grateful once again he’s been trained to recognize the sky from a long list of alliance homeworlds throughout the sector—a primitive skill, but dead useful if you end up displaced in some extraordinary fashion. Which, all things considered, he frequently is.

There. A full hemisphere drawing of the stars. Buzz unfocuses his brain slightly to let the patterns leap out. He surveys the carefully penned dots, rotating the sheet incrementally to see what features jump out.

None do. The star patterns are, in fact, utterly unrecognizable. No Analetheuma IV, no Great Adze, no Hverbeest—no familiar constellations of any culture or any kind across the entire sky. He shouldn't be surprised, really. The stars are different wherever you go. If the chart is depicting an ancient sky or he's even a little far away from a well-known planet, he wouldn't be able to recognize a thing. But it's still a blow, somehow.

Fact is, he has no idea where he is, or how long he’s been here. And now he can’t even be sure he hasn’t been warped clean out of known space and time. With zero bearings to speak of, he finds that the prospect of an endless loop of capture and mind-wipe has really started to make him itch. If he’s ever going to return home, he needs to get to the bottom of his mysterious predicament. Fortunately, he's pretty sure now where he can get some real answers.

“Of course; go where you’re called. Thanks to you, I’ve got some basic intel and these star charts. I’ll have to study them carefully. This shelter will be excellent temporary accommodation in the meantime.”

True enough, but he doesn’t intend to stay long. It’s time he arrange a chat with the local commandant.