See, I wasn't fibbin', I'm back in Tuneyville, but it's been a struggle.
A lot of this chapter may be a little dry because it covers more of the goblins' history in the non-magical world, to build the image of how they have integrated into the world.
Usual disclaimers, no rights to anything from JKR's stories.
Even though it safeguarded his own position, Dumbledore was disgruntled when the Wizarding Examination Authority reported that Severus Snape had successfully turned things around in his potions classes and most of the students had made the required 'EE' grade. They also reported that those who didn't were the ones who had been holding their classes back and testing them on other subjects confirmed that they were inadequate in most subjects, so they'd probably be moved back a year.
The reason Dumbledore wasn't happy was that Severus was working in his potions lab creating potions for St Mungo's and the Ministry most of the time he didn't have classes so he was not available to do any of the little 'tasks' that Albus generally had him doing, he didn't even have meals in the Great Hall any more except for the feasts. Severus and everyone else was quite happy with this arrangement and it was already turning into a good money earner for Hogwarts, but Albus didn't like the fact that what he wanted wasn't the most important consideration, or even an important consideration.
Having Remus and Alastor around the Lodge quite a bit meant that the older children and the adults were getting better training, but at first that didn't make any difference to the little kids who were having a great time as toddlers… at first.
They didn't know what it was, the only idea proposed that made any sense was the fact that the three of them were incredibly powerful and all their bindings had been removed, but Harry, Hermione and Luna were growing in size, maturity and power much faster than the other kids. By the time Harry and Luna were four they looked five or six, Hermione looked six or seven, and they were already halfway through primary school.
Dan and Jean were just glad that they'd taken the advice to sell their dental practice and get teaching credentials with the goblins' help so they could help teach the kids at the Lodge after they were told about Hermione being magical, because it meant that they actually got to see their little girl growing up so fast. They also learnt some non-wand based Wizarding magic, and some Goblin and Elf magic as well, though Jean showed more affinity for the non-Wizarding magic.
Gringott, Tuney, Arabella, the Grangers and the Lovegoods agreed that the kids needed to have more of a childhood before they moved into secondary school, so they were tossing around ideas about how to get them to slow down, and Gringott came up with an idea that the others liked. The Potters had both magical and non-magical business empires and properties all over the world and Harry was going to have to claim them, so the three kids, and Danny as well, could visit the Potter properties with Tuney, Arabella, the Grangers and a suitable guard for the Patron of the Goblin Nations…. With their early maturity, Harry, Hermione and Luna had all been accepted by their family magic as the Heads of their Houses so Pandora became Regent and Remus Steward for all their Houses. Gringott used the resources of the Goblin Nations to cover up the fact that they had taken their titles, and also the three of them had been entered into male and female line betrothal contracts with each other to protect them against anyone else trying to trap any of the kids into betrothal and marriage. This meant that Bagnold, Dumbledore and the Death Eaters were trying to work out what houses had been re-activated to give the Druids so much of a boost in the Wizengamot, and by whom.
But the angle that Tuney, Arabella and the Grangers particularly liked about what Gringott was proposing was the fact that they'd be mainly travelling as Muggles so that the Heir to the Potter empire could be seen to be alive and claiming his non-magical properties and business interests. Gringott smiled. "Well, you'll appear to be travelling as Muggles anyway…."
He hesitated. "Do you want the short version of this or the full story? I must warn you that the full story will probably take quite a while to explain."
The others were intrigued now, so they asked for the full story but Gringott shook his head..
"Very well, we have to go back several centuries, but you should know the story before you meet people as Harry's guardians and advisors…. For a start, I told you that the Goblin Nations began establishing themselves in the non magical world six hundred odd years ago?" Tuney and Pandora nodded.
"Well the presence we created had to be under a known name to be accepted and the Potter family has been noble in the non magical world as long as it has in the magical world, so we used that to reduce resistance to our attempts to establish our enterprises, and everything is officially owned by the Potters… Which means that they are almost as wealthy and powerful in the non magical world as they are in the magical world. By agreement, this has been kept a secret by the non magical world's governments, but the upper nobility and the truly wealthy commoners who now drive the non magical world are aware of it."
"The Potters have had estates in Macaronesia, which is made up of the Azores, Madeira, Savage Islands, Canary Islands and Cabo Verde archipelagos, for over half a millennium….. Charlus always had a fondness for their Hacienda on Santa Maria Island in the Azores because it is a truly beautiful place and he spent a good part of his childhood there with his mother while his father was embroiled in the troubles of the First World War in the non magical world….. Over time, they became quite established in the islands, and so did the People because the beauty of being that close to Africa was that we could be passed off as some of the strange peoples who came from the heart of the Dark Continent. The point is that this allowed us to live openly among the people of these sparsely occupied islands, and our hiding from the sailors who came to the islands was easily explained as fear of slavers or being taken away as a curiosity…."
"Most people of the islands were against the Portuguese and Spanish who had just claimed the islands and then exploited them and their people for everything they could get out of them, but when they were attacked by pirates or invading navies and armies, the countries they were supposed to be a part of just turned their backs on them, and if they had the temerity to complain or try and get out from under the yoke of their rulers, they were put down by the military force of their so called parent countries. This came to a head in the First World War, where ports and ships in the Azores, Madeira and Canary Islands were all attacked by the German U Boats and they refused to do anything. The only armed defence in any of the incidents was from an American armed collier in the Azores that fired back at a U Boat and made it break off its attack, and the Americans began to send ships to establish a naval operating base in Ponta Delgada as a result of that, but they were mainly worried about the Germans taking over the islands and using them as a base to attack their shipping from. As I said, Harry's Great Grandfather and namesake, Duke Henry Potter, had considerable power in the non magical world as he was upper nobility in a number of powerful countries and also had the power of the Potter business empire behind him, so with the agreement of the people of the islands, at the end of the war we made our move, citing hundreds of years of history of the countries that had claimed them because they had more might than the people living there and exploited them for centuries, while continuously refusing to protect them when they were attacked and demanding that the islands of Macaronesia be released from being possessions of Portugal and Spain and be recognised as the sovereign country of Macaronesia….."
"Britain and France especially didn't want to agree to anything that might encourage their own possessions to start demanding their independence, but Henry called in a lot of political favours and they couldn't come up with any logical arguments, so the islands of Macaronesia were officially recognised as the sovereign country of Macaronesia and that Portugal and Spain no longer had any control or rights over them in July Nineteen Nineteen. We had no problem with agreeing to the proviso that we would not discuss the fact that Macaronesia was now a sovereign country or that the countries that had previously owned the islands that now made up Macaronesia had been forced to relinquish their claims over the archipelagos and the territorial waters around them. It wasn't missed by many of them that we immediately presented a national flag that was mainly made up of the flags that had already been created by the independence movements in most of the archipelagos when they were trying to get free of their masters, but the sea powers tried to argue that allowing the creation of Macaronesia would just create another country who depended on them for protection if another war came along."
"We were prepared for that though, and Henry immediately offered a Quarter of a Million Pounds for exclusive salvage rights in regard to all vessels from the German High Seas Fleet that were scuttled in the Scapa Flow on the Twenty First of June Nineteen Nineteen and two years exclusive use of everything at the Wilhelmshaven Imperial Shipyard on behalf of the Nation of Macaronesia. This offer was made on the proviso that Macaronesia would have the inalienable right to make use of any repaired and reinstated destroyers and cruisers from the High Seas Fleet to form a Navy to protect Macaronesia from attack. This fitted into the plans of the British Admiralty quite well and the US Navy liked the idea of not having to divert their forces to protect the archipelagos, so they pressured the French and Italians into signing off on the proposal, they even passed on the large floating drydocks that had been claimed from Germany in reparation for scuttling the fleet in the Scapa Flow so that any repairs to the destroyers or cruisers that hadn't been completed within two years could be finished off in Macaronesia."
"Of course they were rather shocked when the remaining ships that had been run aground and the ones scuttled in shallow waters started disappearing from the Scapa Flow within a few weeks, and they were all gone by the end of Nineteen Nineteen. They were astounded by how fast the destroyers and light cruisers were being fixed up and sent on to Macaronesia, as they were only being pulled up long enough to patch any damage to their hulls, repainted and put back in the water. They didn't get to see what was happening inside though, because we had been using magic to salvage the oil fired boilers from ships sunk through the war…. along with the steam turbines, diesels, generators and electric drives, guns, turrets and magazines, torpedo tubes, munitions, boats and anything else we could make use of…. and converted the coal bunkers on our ships to fuel oil bunkers because all of the coal fired boilers had been replaced with oil fired ones. The mine laying destroyers and cruisers also had the mine laying equipment and stores replaced with extra guns and magazines."
"The British Admiralty tried to challenge us when we repaired the battlecruisers and sent them off to Macaronesia, but we just pointed out that the official agreement stated that we could use any cruisers we repaired, and they were officially cruisers. They couldn't argue about that, but they were worried that we'd somehow managed to twist what they'd thought was an agreement to get a few destroyers and light cruisers to protect the islands from stray attacks into a fleet of thirty two destroyers, five light cruisers and five battle cruisers which were capable of challenging battleships. The fact that we were removing the turrets, superstructures and armour from the eleven battleships we had salvaged mollified them, until they realised that we weren't scrapping the hulls, we were converting them into cargo ships and tankers. Once again they could not argue that converting the warships to serve a commercial purpose in no way contravened the agreements that had been made, so they didn't bother saying anything when they heard that we'd acquired the four uncompleted Mackensen class battle cruisers and two Bayern class battleships, because while a commercial vessel fleet made up of five hundred and sixty five, seventy five and ninety feet long ships, let alone seven hundred and thirty foot ones, was almost unheard of, it certainly didn't contravene anything they'd agreed to. They were worried, but realised that they didn't have grounds to complain when they discovered that all of the heavy guns from the battleships that they'd been planning to demand be turned over to them had disappeared…. But their worry became panic when they discovered that most of the ports and islands in Macaronesia had suddenly acquired coastal batteries made up of the twin or single gun turrets that had been taken from the eleven battleships…. Because between those guns and the warships and aircraft we had, Macaronesia was well placed to defend itself against anyone who went against them, and that would include them if they changed their minds about supporting the sovereignty of Macaronesia."
"They did squawk when they discovered that one of the Mackensen hulls was being completed as an aircraft carrier though, but once again they had to back down when we challenged them to show proof that we didn't have the right to build ourselves an aircraft carrier. The Americans kept out of that discussion, because they knew where most of our aircraft had come from….. The thing was, we had discovered, with the improving communications from the beginning of the Twentieth Century, that people were starting to realise that the ones who made up our Shadow world somehow seemed to be able to get themselves and cargo from one country to another faster than anyone else, and without going through the usual checkpoints. The war gave us a chance to think about a solution to that issue, and we decided to make use of the much faster warships that were emerging and the rapidly expanding field of aeronautics to cover up how we were moving our people in the Shadow world around. The People's youngest clan, the Rubik Clan, was specifically created a little over three centuries ago to investigate developments in human non-magical technology and identify how the People can benefit from them and where they can be improved, they were the ones who developed the People's firearms and they have brought a lot of wealth to the People through selling improvements they came up with to the humans."
"As I said, the Rubik Clan had been keeping a close eye on the technology and the humans' situation and on their advice we made a deal with the Americans at the end of the war, trading bags of cash for everything we wanted of the surplus aircraft that they supposedly burned up in the infamous 'Billion Dollar Bonfire' and any trucks, cars, motorcycles and other equipment they had to leave behind, including what they'd claimed from the Germans… We had been planning on acquiring ex warships the same way to update our shipping fleet because most of our ships appeared to be out of date until the German High Seas Fleet scuttled its interned ships to prevent them being taken by the Entente Powers…. And as I said, we had been taking any oil fired boilers, steam turbines, diesels, electric drives and the like from ships sunk in the war to allow us to upgrade any ships we acquired to make it more believable for them to be faster than other commercial ships, and we were acquiring the guns, magazines and ammunition stores, torpedo tubes and stores, machine guns and other weapons to improve our defensive capabilities…. We also picked up a few hundred ex naval drifters and trawlers cheap to create fishing fleets for the islands, and while they weren't exactly fighting machines, they were rearmed after we got them so the Macaronesia Navy was actually quite large….. In fact the Macaronesia military in general is quite large because every able bodied man, woman, goblin and dwarf plays their part, whether it be in the infantry, artillery, Air Corps or Navy… while many of the others are in the support services and every household is armed, the islands had been preyed on for centuries and their people were prepared to step forward and help put a stop to that."
"We allowed the older and less useful planes and equipment to be burnt up in the bonfire to support the story once we had removed the engines and whatever else the artisans thought could be useful, as we mainly wanted the heavy bombers, and the later fighter bombers that would be more useful to us. One of the Glenn Martin planes based on their heavy bomber had caught the eye of the artisans of the Rubik Clan because it had been converted to carry ten passengers, they used it as the template to convert the rest of the heavy bombers into passenger transports and made other improvements like reconstructing and improving the engines and adding numerous runic enchantments, such as lightening charms, expanded fuel tanks, giving them the ability to expand the interior and go silent and invisible on demand and avoid collisions when required and unstructured portkeys like the ones used on the Knight Bus so that once they were out of sight they could 'hop' to their destination. We had set up facilities for our new air transport company Jotnar Air Services at Croydon Aerodrome in London and a number of other aerodromes around the world when we first started using the aircraft whenever our people needed to be seen to be moving from one place to another."
"The engines and anything else that could be useful were removed from many of the aircraft before they were burnt, though the People did keep and improve the fighter bombers and torpedo bombers to a lesser degree than we had the transport planes and kept them ready to fly because we'd seen how much damage aircraft can do with their machine guns and bombs when they attack targets on the ground and wanted the People to have that capability if the Wizards tried to attack us again. On the outside, the planes of the new Macaronesia Air Corps didn't look too different from the ones they had come from, but they performed better and were safer."
"While we were in Europe, we bought up umpteen thousands of kilometres of the French Decauville and German Heeresfeldbahn sixty centimetre track that had been manufactured to create temporary railways in the war, along with hundreds of petrol, petrol electric, battery electric and diesel engines to haul cars on those tracks, and several dozen of the Zwillinge steam engines for hauling heavy loads on the steeper runs. We also acquired hundreds of flatcars, gondola cars, boxcars, passenger and tank cars… along with petrol, petrol electric, electric and diesel autorails and draisines and trailers for the autorails. We picked up all of the Saint-Chamond petrol electric tanks that were being scrapped and the electric autorails were converted to petrol electric or battery electric, while the Zwillinges were converted to hot bulb engines. We laid tracks between the villages and ports on all the islands and every village had at least one engine and draisine and a few flatcars, and a small but efficient generating set running off a hot bulb engine to provide their power needs. We had acquired a fair few trucks, cars and motorcycles as well, but it was easier for people to use the rail cars, even more so after we added passing loops at frequent intervals between the villages so the main problem was avoiding collisions, but they don't go too fast and they soon learned to keep an eye out for what was coming down the track. Of course no one could work out how those light temporary tracks were still holding up decades later, but we just let them think that we had enough track to keep replacing it as it failed because we weren't about to admit that we're repairing them with magic. We also added aerodromes on all the islands to allow people to move between the islands quickly. Between the generators, handy rail systems, earthmoving equipment, aircraft and aerodromes and fishing and transport ships, Macaronesia went from being forgotten, backward islands to quite advanced without losing its culture after the war. Most of the industry in Macaronesia is still geared towards self sufficiency, farming, fishing and producing what we use in the islands, but the transport companies and tourism bring money in so we're fairly prosperous."
"Making sure that people saw us using the heavy bombers and ex warships as transports worked to stop them talking about our people in the non magical world, but the bombers were slow and cumbersome, and more to the point they offended the sensibilities of the Rubik Clan's artisans because they were badly engineered. That was why they insisted that we get major stakes in Junkers and quite a number of other German companies at the end of the war, because they had been impressed with a lot of the German engineering they saw in the war and investing in them would help keep them afloat in the chaos that was the Weimar Republic, we also got stakes in some of the British, French, Nordic and American companies while they were struggling after the war, but we got the biggest stakes in the German companies."
"We managed to get just about all of the Junkers ground attack planes and fighters that were left after the war and most of them were used for the People's Air Corps after the artisans removed the J Ones' upper wings and armour and fitted improved Hispano-Suiza Eight engines and the bomb racks from the planes that were burnt and added runic enchantments to all of them. When they saw Junkers plans for the F Thirteen four passenger transports that came out just after the war though, the Rubik Clan's artisans decided to try converting some of the J Ones into improved versions of them, using the larger upper wings that had been taken off the ones they converted to monoplanes. Their versions worked quite well, and they looked close enough to the F Thirteens to be passed off as them, so they converted twenty of the J Ones to six passenger transports with improved versions of the bigger Liberty Twelve engines, but while they preferred their own transports to the old bombers, they had to concede that they were too small to replace them as our primary carriers because they were officially F Thirteens so they could officially only carry four or five passengers….."
"But then the Junkers G Twenty Fours came out in Twenty Four, and they were made to carry up to fourteen passengers officially, so the Rubik Clan insisted that we get the new Junkers as our primary carriers. We had learned that ignoring them on matters of human technology was a mistake well over a century before, so we got twenty of the first Junkers G Twenty Four airframes that were built as they became available over Twenty Four and Twenty Five and the artisans built them up as F Twenty Fours with single turbocharged Liberty engines and made the same improvements as they'd done to the other aircraft. As the F Twenty Fours entered service, the old bombers were shrunk down and kept as mementos in our offices to stop the Rubik Clan artisans burning them to show what they really thought of them…. they may have offended the artisans' sense of what was right and proper for an aeroplane but they did serve us well up until the G Twenty Fours came out…... Then Junkers came out with the slightly bigger and better G Thirty One fifteen passenger and the W Thirty Four, which was an improved six passenger development of their F Thirteen, in Twenty Six, so we got the first ten of each of them as well. The G Thirty Ones were fitted with twin turbocharged Liberty engines and the W Thirty Fours got single turbocharged Liberty engines and they were improved and given the same runic enchantments as the earlier aircraft, then we transfigured our F Twenty Fours and so called F Thirteens to match the improved G Thirty Ones and W Thirty Fours so we effectively had thirty of each….."
"We didn't go for the G Thirty Eights when Junkers showed them to us in Twenty Nine because they were too big, too heavy and too unusual to be useful to us. The whole point of this exercise was to stop people looking at us and we could officially carry the same number of people faster using less fuel and attracting a lot less attention using the more normal planes…. But when the seventeen passenger JU Fifty Twos came out in Nineteen Thirty, we got ten of them and converted them to twin turbocharged Liberty engines like the G Thirty Ones, and in Thirty Two we added ten of the JU Sixty, six passenger fast transport airframes, they had been rejected by Germany's state airline, but the main thing they needed to fix their issues was a better engine and the turbocharged Liberty engines worked quite well for that…. Well that and extending them into eight passenger planes… and we transfigured the older planes into JU Fifty Twos and Sixties so we had forty of each."
Dan cut in with a question at that point. "If you can just transfigure the planes like that, why did you need all those engines?"
"It is a matter of complexity Dan, the aircraft frames, skins, wings, undercarriage and the like are all basically static structures, so once we have the image with all the relevant properties memorised, we can transfigure something similar into a copy of it, but engines involve hundreds of individual moving parts, if not more, that interact with or act against each other and it is too complex an image to be able to keep in mind for the transfiguration process. If we have supplies of the engines we want to use though, once the artisans make improvements to some of them, transfiguration can be used to copy those improvements onto the other engines we have, so we can take what's available and improve it to meet our needs."
"The transport planes and ex warships were working well to put paid to the suspicions about how our people were moving around, but when World War Two began, we had to remove all our aircraft from the areas effected by the war until they were no longer at risk of being appropriated for the war effort. We initially moved them to Santa Maria Island, but the Americans decided that where the aerodrome on Santa Maria Island was was a much better location than Lages Field for a major airfield to support the war effort in Forty Four because among other things there was a rail line coming up from from the protected and well established docks in Villa Porta that ran straight past it, so we had to move the aircraft we had there again. The Americans weren't at all happy when the Macaronesian government insisted that Santa Maria was a private island and made them negotiate directly with Charlus, or Don Carlos as he was known there, to use his island for their airfield, or that he stood firm on the position that he would lease the aerodrome land to them for their airfield, but not sell it to them. They still built a major facility there, with runways long enough to handle the biggest transatlantic transport planes, major hospital and repair facilities, fuel reservoirs, their own power station and a pipeline up from Villa Porta for fuel. The first Commander for the Airfield had to be replaced when his response to being reminded that any interference with the locals, especially the girls, or attempts to forcibly enter private property or the coastal defence installations would result in the guilty parties being shot was to send an armed force to the hacienda to let this 'Don Carlos' know who was boss. Unfortunately for him, we were several steps ahead of him and he found his superiors waiting for him at the hacienda…. Charlus made him sweat for ten minutes or more before he said that a demotion of several grades and a posting to somewhere in the Aleutian Islands would hopefully be enough to teach him a lesson when the General asked Ambassador Potter what punishment he would be calling for in response to this armed attack against his person…. Needless to say, that fool's replacement was told the whole story, including the fact that if Charlus had demanded that he be shot, he would have been, and we didn't have any trouble with the Americans based on the island after that….."
Gringott snorted. "That is something else you should know about Macaronesia…. While the Head of the Potter Family officially holds what amounts to a hereditary Ambassador's position, most of the people of the Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands were traditionally royalists, so Macaronesia was basically created as a constitutional monarchy…... The Potters are by far the highest ranking nobility in the islands, and just as they are revered by the People for creating the Goblin Nations, Henry is revered for being the one who managed to get Macaronesia created, which means that Harry is basically regarded as royalty in Macaronesia."
"Anyway, the Americans couldn't make head nor tail of the funny little men who made up most of the local labour force building their air field, but the Seabees were so impressed with them that the local Seabee commanders were trying to entice a lot of the goblins and dwarves working on the construction to take up United States Citizenship and join the Seabees. At the end of the war, the Americans made an arrangement with the British and the Macaronesian government to take over the Lages Field facilities the British had been using through the war, and ended up using most of what they had built on Santa Maria to help settle up what they owed Charlus for leasing the aerodrome land, as he had made the terms quite harsh in an attempt to dissuade them from using Santa Maria. We decided to officially make the air field a civil airport when we took it over, to better cover up our activities, so Santa Maria Airport became the new headquarters of Jotnar Air Services."
"That was also when we got confirmation of what we'd observed at the end of World War One, that the cheapest and easiest way by far to expand our air, land and sea fleets was to pick up surplus aircraft, vehicles and vessels that the military were getting rid of in the big wars, and that the Americans in particular tend to get rid of an incredible amount of planes, vehicles, vessels and equipment once the wars were over. We found out that the reason for this was the fact that they were rarely held accountable for how much money was lost in the wars and that included dumping whatever had been bought for the war, so when people came along with bags of cash and offered to buy large quantities of the used equipment that they were supposed to take home and find a use for, they generally jumped at the chance to sell them whatever they wanted. We also discovered that they were prepared to do whatever it took to get rid of all the aircraft, vessels and equipment they were left with….."
He shook his head…
"We had planned to try and get a few hundred surplus military transport aircraft to build up our air fleet, a dozen or two Victory ships, maybe a hundred Tank Landing Ships…. because they had thousands of them….. and a few dozen LSMs to update and expand our shipping fleets, with a hundred or so LCMs and LCVPs to move cargo between ship and shore for when we were shipping cargo to locations where there weren't proper dock facilities…. And a thousand or two trucks to ramp our land transportation businesses to match. It would be a fairly substantial purchase but we were expecting it to be Knuts on the Galleon if that compared to buying the aircraft, vessels and vehicles any other way…. What we hadn't really understood at that point though was that we had become the American Army and Navy's favourite people by then, because we'd spent more on surplus aircraft, ships and equipment with them since the First World War than anyone else ever had…. Apparently anyone else with money generally wanted more than the military surplus equipment offered."
"The negotiations with the American Army and Navy after World War Two didn't go the way we were expecting, because before we could even ask about what we'd planned, they proposed a deal where we got thousands of transport, observation and utility aircraft, fighter bombers, dive bombers, bombers and attack planes that were written off as obsolete or damaged…. As well as four Casa Grande landing ship docks the Royal Navy had had under a lend lease arrangement and were returning at the end of the war and a few other damaged ones, hundreds of tank landing ships, thousands of tank landing craft, LCM landing craft and LCVP Higgins boats and even more trucks, jeeps, motorcycles and whatever other vehicles and equipment the Army and Navy were using for around Fifty Million Dollars all up, which amounted to next to nothing for what we were getting, so long as we took the lot off their hands and shipped it out of there ourselves.….."
"We didn't have a use for most of that, especially as we'd driven the Germans back long enough to disappear most of the ships scuttled by the French at Toulon, but when we tried to tell them that we couldn't take the deal because we didn't have the ships we needed to move all that or anywhere to keep it, the Navy officially turned over Yonabaru Airfield on Okinawa and the docks the Seabees had built there to us for as long as it took for us to load everything onto our ships and ship it home, and set up negotiations for us with the British to get exclusive use of the German naval shipyard at Wilhelmshaven for the same purpose….. remembering how Henry had secured exclusive use of the shipyard for two years after the First World War but not realising that we were the same people…. though they didn't know that the deal we worked out with the British Navy and Army was that we actually bought the shipyard and a lot of the land nearby outright, along with quite a lot of the British surplus vessels and equipment because they wanted to recoup some of what they spent on the war too, and they had the Royal Engineers build a big enough runway to handle the biggest long distance transports on our land…. and the Navy also made the official undertaking to sign over whatever ships we required from the ships that were being mothballed once they brought the soldiers home and sold us the Tongue Point Naval Air Station near Portland in Oregon outright to give us a place to keep the ships and everything they wanted us to take off their hands, they even had the Seabees clear and level enough land to put in the warehouses to hold it all and build a runway like we had in Wilhelmshaven behind the station."
"The thing was, now that the war was over, the Army and Navy were worried about how they were going to get rid of all the surplus aircraft, vessels and equipment that had mostly been written off as obsolete, damaged or useless. They were also well aware of the fact that it would quite possibly cost them more to ship it all home than they'd get by selling it off as surplus and damaged equipment once they did so so they'd decided that getting us to take most of it for a nominal amount and making it our responsibility to get rid of it was the smart move…. Of course they had no idea that it doesn't matter how long things are kept in stasis so if we didn't have a use for them a hundred years they'd still be the same as when they went in, or that the People have the process to put just about any object into stasis and reduce it to one percent of its original size and weight down to a wave of the hand, and returning it is just as quick, so we can have planes, vessels, vehicles and equipment out on display and people will believe that they're very detailed models."
He indicated where he had a number of 'model' aeroplanes, helicopters, ships, vehicles, earthmoving equipment etc displayed on shelves with a goblin smile and they laughed, hiding their war machines in plain site was definitely an art that the People had mastered, and then he went on.
"Since the First World War we have gained considerable political mileage with the American and British military especially as we to all intents and purposes have taken a large proportion of the aircraft, vessels and land and amphibious vehicles they'd been tasked with getting rid of on the basis of 'no questions asked' through all the wars they've fought in, and pointed out that they could legitimately argue to the big brass back home that they probably got as much as they would have selling that much equipment off in bulk once they got it there, without all the costs of shipping it home. For that matter, they have also been grateful that we took many of the aircraft, vessels and vehicles that they had seized from the ones they defeated because they didn't know what to do with them. In real terms, being in the military's good books usually meant that we are in their governments' good books as well, so buying up big whenever they want to get rid of their surplus planes, vessels, vehicles and equipment has effectively put some of the world's most powerful governments in our debt.… The fact that it has also built up our land, sea and air transport fleets to the point where we are among the world's biggest transport concerns hasn't hurt either because that gives us the economic power to match the political power we hold."
"Anyway…. We had to find some way to ostensibly transport all of those aircraft we bought, but the Rubik Clan had uncovered some rather interesting information about the four Sangamon class Escort Carriers which had started out as Cimmaron class replenishment oilers… Apparently their proper designation should have been Merchant Aircraft Carriers rather than Escort Carriers because they were still functional tankers, they'd just had most of their under way replenishment equipment removed and their hold capacity reduced a little when the hangar and flight decks were added. The US Navy were mothballing the Sangamons along with most of their other escort carriers after the war, but being able to be used as both tankers and carriers, those so called Escort Carriers could potentially be very useful to us, so we grabbed them….Along with the two damaged Essex class aircraft carriers Franklin and Bunker Hill and the half completed Reprisal…. We also acquired the Navy's seven biggest floating drydocks, USS ASBD One through Seven, which were made up of sixty four sections which we had to pull apart and pretend to tow back separately from Papua New Guinea, Guam and the Philippines separately to explain how we managed to fix up our ships as we didn't use any established shipyards other than the one in Wilhelmshaven and most of the ships we acquired were on the other side of the world. Of course to make the act convincing we also had to acquire a fleet of ocean and yard tugs and rescue and salvage ships, along with all the floating cranes and workshops that went with them.… Mind you it wasn't hard to convince the Navy to sell us all that dirt cheap because they didn't see any more need to have floating dry docks and mobile shipyard equipment any more with the war over, and they were looking at it costing them millions to get it all back to America so they couldn't sign off on the deal fast enough. They bought ten sections back from us at the start of the Korean War and another four in Nineteen Sixty to use to maintain their North Atlantic submarine fleet, but overall it worked out well for both sides…."
"The Rubik Clan grabbed two dozen of the Casablanca Class Escort Carriers that had been mothballed, because they had plans for them as well, we supposedly used them and the Sangamons to ship many of the military surplus aircraft and smaller craft we'd bought home… And they reminded us to acquire as many turbine electric and diesel electric systems as we could find to convert into our magical generators and electric drive systems for the ships we were acquiring, the Americans still don't know that we removed all the turbines, diesels and electric drives from the ships they used for the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests when they were sunk or scuttled after the test, because we could magically remove nearly all of the radioactive contamination, we've also recovered the drives, guns and the rest from most of the ships sunk in the war, just as we did in the First World War…. and we've made sure we got the scrapping contracts for anything with turbine electric, diesel electric or diesel drives. They haven't classified the Bikini Atoll site as being clean enough for divers to check the wrecks yet because when they tried in Nineteen Forty Six the divers almost got buried in radioactive mud, but we could generate shields to protect us while we removed the drive systems."
"We found out what the Rubik Clan's plans for the Casablancas were soon enough, because as soon as they got them into the floating drydocks, the artisans examined the Casa Grande dock landing ship hulls to work out exactly what they needed to transfigure the escort carriers' hulls and turn them into large cargo dock ships that are very easy to load and unload, while retaining their hangar and flight decks and they transfigured the hulls of the Casablancas, the Essexes and the Açor…. And as we acquired the turbine electric steam plants, they were upgraded with magically enhanced generators and electric drive systems and runic enchantments to make them perform better and be much less work to run. This had the effect of turning them all into Merchant Carriers, so they could generally be used as freighters, but if there was a need they could easily be turned back into aircraft carriers."
"The Navy was surprised and more than a little miffed when they discovered that we'd used their official offer to take whatever mothballed ships we could use to grab about a hundred of their T Two SEA One oilers, magically enhance their turbine electric steam plants, clean out most of their oil holds and convert them to cargo holds, add cranes and send them off with the escort carriers to start collecting the aircraft, small vessels and other equipment we acquired after the war, because they'd been hinting for us to take some of the hundreds of obsolete and questionable Liberty Ships off their hands, but they calmed down when we cleared everything out and released Yonabaru Airfield and cleared out everything we got in Europe a year before they expected us to. Luckily they couldn't see any use for Tongue Point other than as a location to mothball the Liberty ships so they didn't push too hard to buy it back off us and the British were happy to uphold the deal for the shipyards because we were employing a lot of the local population who lost their jobs when the shipyards were closed down. We sold the shipyard, airfield and properties off to German companies that belong to us in the Fifties and they let the German government buy part of the shipyard back to form their naval base at the end of the fifties, so we have retained control and use of the port and airport but are still on good terms with the German government."
"Then after the Korean War we got some of the newer tank landing ships and hundreds of the newer LCM Six and fibreglass LCVP landing craft that they'd started making for Korea. All of the ships were repaired if necessary, improved, converted to our magically enhanced electric drives and had runic enchantment enhancements added. Many of the LCTs and LCMs we acquired after the Second World War were transfigured to create improved bigger steel LCMs and LCVPs and got the magically enhanced electric drives and runic enchantments.… Of course the Americans and British had no idea that as soon as we got them out of sight we shrank the smaller ships and planes them down to one percent of their original size and made them feather light so they could have all easily fitted into one ship and put them in stasis until we were ready to deal with them but we couldn't get away with doing that with the bigger ships because they were too visible, and we had to make a show of dismantling most of the planes to store them on the carriers' flight and hangar decks or in the cargo ships' holds…. And we had to restrict the ship loads to what they expected to see fitting into a load, so we had quite a few ships steaming far enough out to sea for us to get away with changing their appearance and then coming back for a new load…. Yonabaru Airfield and the naval shipyard at Wilhelmshaven were two of the busiest ports in the world for a year after the war…"
"After the Korean War we also snapped up the hundred odd 'scrapped' KC Ninety Seven Stratofreighter aerial tankers that were easily converted to transports, along with a couple of thousand transport and observation planes that were written off as damaged or obsolete, several hundred odd Douglas A One Skyraider ground attack planes and several hundred helicopters when the Americans offered them to us… And after the Vietnam War we took the several hundred transport and observation planes, well over a thousand helicopters and over two thousand fighters and ground attack planes they offered us for 'scrapping' without hesitation. We also… disappeared…. many of the aircraft, vessels, vehicles and equipment that was left behind by the Americans and South Vietnamese after they lost the war and added that to our fleets."
"Since World War Two, the piston engined planes and helicopters have all been upgraded to turboprop or turboshaft engines as we began using them…. the Junkers we had before the war were put into stasis, shrunk and kept as momentos because we had thousands of planes to replace them with….. until after the Korean War our fleets were mainly made up of Curtis C Forty Sixes and Douglas C Forty Sevens and C Thirty Threes…. and the turboprop, turboshaft and jet engines have also been upgraded…. our artisans fixed all the problems with them and the planes we acquired received the same runic enchantments as the earlier planes did…. The Skyraiders have all been upgraded to the much faster turboprop Skysharks with contra rotating propellers that the human engineers couldn't get to work and the wider AD Five fuselages, and the Chickasaws we're using have been changed into the equivalents of improved turboshaft Chocktaws.…. And the ships and landing craft have all been converted to magical electric drives with runic enchantments to improve their performance and make them less work to run."
"We moved our main base of operations in Britain from Croyden Airport to London Airport at Heathcote after the Korean War because Croyden was closing in four or five years and the Stratofreighters wouldn't fit into the hangars we had at Croyden. At that time we also bought into Gatwick Airport at Crawley and built more hangars there to ensure that we had options if the situation at London Airport changed."
"Since the mid Sixties, we have been picking up jet and turboprop airliners and business planes to upgrade our fleet. Most of them had their engines upgraded, they all had whatever problems they had fixed and received similar runic enchantments to our other planes… The reason for getting the later turboprops and jets was to replace the older propeller aircraft we were using in the busier areas because advances in aircraft tracking technology and communications meant that we couldn't get away with hopping the slower prop planes around the busier parts of world any more without someone noticing, and older prop transports were drawing too much attention. We're still using some of the older prop transports as…. well, props… for our operations in the more out of the way areas to explain how we're moving people and cargo around so much, but the newer turboprops and jets are what we keep at the major airports and use for the more visible runs now…."
"The majority of Jotnar Air Services' obviously military transports are based at Santa Maria Airport, and a good number of the Skysharks and jet attack planes and fighters are there as well…. While obsolete according to the Americans, those old attack planes meet our needs quite well, because what the People mainly need them for is to destroy warded wizarding facilities and any creatures the Wizards send against us…. and with their ability to 'hop' to their destination, they can deliver devastating blows directly to the Wizards in nearly two thousand different locations at once if necessary with bombs, rockets and heavy guns if they ever try to start another war with the People.… Several thousand if you include the Shadow world's attack planes…. The Skysharks and Havocs that make up three quarters of the People's and the Shadow world's attack planes can also carry teams of warriors to go in and finish the job after the planes have done their part…."
He gave a goblin grin at that. "Being able to make the planes weigh almost nothing means that they need less than a hundred feet to land and take off so our warriors can be put down almost anywhere."
"After the Second World War, the fact that the Potter business empire was based in and tied to Macaronesia was known to the American, British and more than a few of the other governments, but as I said they have been keeping that information close to the chest. That was why the US Navy offered us the Mitscher class destroyers in Seventy Three…. The USS Mitscher and John McCain had been converted to guided missile destroyers in the mid Sixties to test the new missile systems, but the Navy decided to scrap them after the Mitscher came in for yet another major overhaul in late Seventy Two, because the steam plants they were fitted with in the early Sixties were causing almost continuous problems, while the Willis Lee and Wilkinson had already been struck off as a cost cutting measure and their weapons systems were partly removed so they were basically giving them to us to scrap. We were well known for completely rebuilding most of our ships when we got them, so they were basically offering the Mitscher and John McCain to us for their weapons systems and included the weapons systems that had been stripped out of another destroyer that was used for the missile testing to sweeten the deal, as you humans say, needless to say we jumped at the chance. Of course they all got our magically enhanced generators and electric drive systems and runic enhancements as soon as we got to Santa Maria."
"The US Navy was all for selling us the Mitscher destroyers, partly because the Americans had issues the Estado Novo regime and liked the idea of having us nearby as an armed deterrent to help keep them in line, and even more because the Navy wanted to recoup some of what the missile testing program had cost them by selling us the destroyers…. And being accepted as a sovereign nation means we can legitimately keep the destroyers, as well as our other warships and warplanes equipped with up to date weapons, missiles and bombs. We normally keep half of the warships and the Potter yachts shrunk and in stasis to reduce the upkeep so people are usually asking where they are, which worries Portugal, but then everyone has been looking for our ten aircraft carrier sized floating dry docks most of the time for the last forty years too because they can't see how they could disappear… but the Rubik Clan keep ten very nice four and a half by two and a half foot models of the dry docks in their artisans' hall here, as it's quite easy to carry them through the portals to wherever they are needed…."
"And as for the Potter yachts… Harry's grandparents, Charlus and Dorea, understood the necessity of maintaining the expected image for one's position, and people as rich as them were expected to have mega yachts and all the rest of the trappings of being rich and famous. We were originally planning on getting all of the Mitscher destroyers operational with updated missile systems, but the Willis Lee had already had most of its weapons systems stripped out and Dorea pointed out that one more destroyer with cobbled together weapons systems probably wouldn't add that much to the capabilities of the three properly equipped missile destroyers…. But there was nothing wrong with its hull so with our magically enhanced electric drive systems and everything else, we could turn that destroyer into the biggest mega yacht in the world, and that would make most of the ones who tried to lord it over everyone else green with envy, so the Willis Lee was made into the Potters' primary mega yacht, the Santa Maria, a sleek and elegant four hundred and ninety foot lady who can pick up her skirts and do over fifty knots, she set the standard for the ones who really wanted to impress with their mega yachts."
"By the end of the Vietnam War, we'd picked up five of their Terrebonne Parish class, six of their De Soto County class tank landing ships, half a dozen of their LCU Sixteen Ten landing craft, including the only aluminium one they made, hundreds of their LCM Eight Model Four aluminium landing craft, and hundreds more of the later LCM Six and fibreglass LCVP landing craft…. making the magically enhanced electric drive system and runic enchantment improvements to any of the ships and landing craft we are using."
"We also acquired the research submarine USS Albacore in the early Seventies after it was decommissioned at the Rubik Clan's insistence, they rebuilt it with improvements and one of the acrylic spheres made for the DSV Nemo in its nose, it's the MS Blue Fin now but they normally keep it shrunk in stasis in their artisans' hall…. Dealing with the Rubik Clan tends to be like dealing with Lily Potter was, most of the time we cannot work out what they are talking about but what they come up with usually works so well for us that we tend to do what they tell us without question… Lily worked with them quite a bit in the time she was with us, which I for one accept as validation of their worth…. And since the late Seventies, we've acquired the four Osprey class PTF Fast Patrol Boats, which have been cleaned up and converted to fast yachts with magically enhanced electric drive systems but still have their gun mounts and guns, the Essex class aircraft carrier Oriskany after the Navy's proposal to reactivate her in Eighty Two was rejected by Congress because it would have cost over half a billion dollars, and four of the Thomaston class dock landing ships that succeeded the Casa Grandes, the Rubik Clan like the Thomastons so much they have their eyes on the rest of the Thomaston now…. They did a similar conversion to the Oriskany as they did to the other carriers to turn it into a much bigger and better dock cargo ship with a seventy eighty foot wide well deck like the new Tarawa amphibious assault ships and turbine electric steam plants that had been enhanced by the artisans."
"We picked up some BAC One-Elevens, a Blackburn Beverly, HS One Twenty Five and Bell JetRanger and acquired Court Line Aviation's maintenance hangar at Luton Airport when they were liquidated in Nineteen Seventy Four, and we bought out Laker Airways who were based at Gatwick when they went bankrupt in February Eighty Two. Nearly everything Laker Airways had was leased so they didn't have much in the way of assets, a few jet airliners and the equipment in their maintenance hangars and offices at Gatwick and Berlin Tegel was pretty much it, but they had operating licenses in a number of countries and a few useful routes which made it worth our while to buy them out and change the name to Jotnar Airways. We're part owners at Gatwick because we held onto our stake in the Airport when it was sold in Sixty Six, so they couldn't stop us when we decided to purchase the building with the Laker maintenance hangar and offices outright instead of continuing the lease to expand our facilities there, because it was right next to our existing facility and would take bigger planes….. but they didn't try to argue because a big cash injection like that will make it easier to get through the recession. We've kept the air and maintenance crews we needed for the airliners on and took over Freddie Laker's stake in Gatwick Handling…."
"Anyway, the point of all that was that you'll be travelling Muggle style….. in one of the Gulfstream Twos I think… but you'll actually be using magically enhanced transport like you do with the buses and cars here."
Aside from being side tracked by finding out that the most of the People were officially citizens of a nation that had been officially recognised in the non-magical world for nearly seventy years (and even more shocking, that Prime Minister Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth and some other heads of state in the non-magical world were not only aware of the fact that Macaronesia was in fact largely an extension of the Goblin Nations, they wholeheartedly supported putting one over the Wizarding world like this), the family, including the Grangers and the Lovegoods, were quite on board with the idea of the kids touring the Potter properties around the world, especially if they got to visit them at the properties, so they began making arrangements. While small children generally travelled under their parents or guardians' British passports, Harry, Hermione, Luna and the adults who would be travelling with them were all issued with Macaronesian passports as well.
