Chapter 9: Queens & Knaves

Things got busy. Busier.

The goblins were indeed quite interested in the spellwork on the sphere that displayed the whole family tree thing of someone present. I left them one, which they were going to hold as a working model and they'd have their own people try to fine-tune the spellwork for their own official Gringotts use.

The werewolf had been cured, revealing a young woman who had been bitten when she was a child and had been facing that battle for well over a decade. I left instructions to observe, play it safe, and keep it mainly secret to make sure there wasn't some aspect that I hadn't found and addressed.

That led to three others getting the cure, and a few weeks where I had a chance to work with some of the French potion-masters as they tried to back-engineer some spellwork to approximate with potions what I was doing with Divine (as opposed to Arcane) magic.

Finally we went off, Harry getting disentangled from Gabrielle Delacour as the young girl tended to be VERY friendly towards Harry. Still, we needed to get back to England and touch base with some of the other Pactio families again before I tried to figure out more about that post-apocalyptic world and WHY I was able to contact it. It worried me greatly as there was a chance that something had gone very wrong there and if it had been MY fault that would explain why I was incommunicado and had arrived damaged.

Unfortunately, things didn't always work out as planned. Which led to this.

"We travelled in time," noted Harry, standing in the doorway of my Tardis and looking out at our newest landing spot.

"Apparently so," I agreed.

"This is the London Blitz," noted Harry, who WAS up on British History.

"So it is," I agreed. "This isn't supposed to be possible."

"Wizards, dimensional travel," said Harry.

"I built this Tardis," I told him. "It is NOT a real TARDIS. It should simply be a tech-safe magic-shielded dimension-hopping spatially transcendent construct that has a whomping lot of shields and defenses. It shouldn't be possible to travel in time on a single timeline. Maybe this is a seventh universe I managed to access?"

Harry waited by the door while I checked the possibility. Nope. Base reading was the same. This was the universe Harry had come from, it was just that it was September 7 1940. A timepiece I picked up in Mid-Childa, handy little enchantments on it from a universe where dimensional travel was regularly done, confirmed this.

I looked up to find Harry missing from the doorway.

I suppressed the desire to say something nasty. It appeared that not only did I have the whole "Never Arriving Where I Was Aiming For" thing going, I had the "Companion Wandering Off At Inappropriate Times" thing going as well. Was this why nobody in Harry's world had built a Tardis before me? Did building a dimension-travelling phonebox immediately hit you with all the tropes and cliches that plagued the television series "Doctor Who" in those universes where it was fictional and not a documentary?

I grabbed up a couple of purchases and left, scanning for Harry's presence.

I confirmed the date by a newspaper that had been hastily discarded. Mainly because with everything else going wrong, I wanted to make sure the watch wasn't on the fritz.

The first person I stopped and cast a Cure Serious Wounds on was a policeman who looked shell-shocked and had a head wound. Not likely to shift the timeline, there were a lot of people whose life or death didn't alter things beyond the most local of scales. Meddling with such things was NOT going to produce a temporal cascade event, even if highly placed it would be more of a hiccup. Most people worried about paradoxes weren't aware of the fluid nature of time, and how it really required a lot of determined effort to muck things up beyond a very localized area.

It was night and visibility sucked, particularly with all the lights turned off due to the whole bombing thing. I stopped and healed two more civilians caught up in this before I found where Harry was and kept from making any sort of exclamation at that.

She was NOT supposed to be here, at least I don't think she was supposed to be here. I was pretty sure that if she had lived through the London Blitz it would have gotten better mention in some timeline I'd been in. Unless I just couldn't remember it.

I used a Cure Serious Wounds on the leg wound while Harry used his wand to shift bricks away.

"What- What is this?" asked the fourteen year old girl.

"It's really best if you don't comment on this until much later, Your Majesty," I told her. "Wizards tend to get a bit overboard with those memory-altering spells. It's complicated. Is your escort...?"

Harry made a slight retching noise. "Guard's over here."

"Ah," I said. "Well, here we go. Let's get you to safety."

"This going to cause a paradox or something?" asked Harry.

"I don't know," I admitted. The Queen might be enough to produce a rather large alteration in the timeline, but if she had survived to Harry's time then making sure she survived now might indicate either a stable time-loop or some type of interference at work. If someone else had altered the timeline, then I was just nudging things back. "Is she supposed to be here?"

"I'm right here you know," said Elizabeth II.

"No, I don't think so," said Harry. "I thought I heard something about she was supposed to be in Windsor Castle."

"You could ask me, you know," said the once and future Queen.

"Sorry, you're part of this timeline and you therefore wouldn't be aware of any alterations in the timeline," I told her. "Trust me, dimensional travel is confusing enough without adding in the time travel aspects."

"Wizards and time travel?" asked Elizabeth. "Clearly I was a bit more rattled by that bomb than I thought."

"Windsor Castle?" I asked Harry. "Don't suppose you know the coordinates."

"Actually, I wrote them down," Harry told me. "One of the places I wanted to see when we got the chance."

"Now's a good time," I indicated as another bomber went overhead.

We made our way back to the Tardis easily enough. A lot faster when you know where you're going.

She made the usual remarks of how it was bigger on the inside, followed by a more atypical comment about how if you could do this with her purse it would be ever so handy. Actually, the bit about the bigger inside was gratifying in that it is always nice to have one's efforts acknowledged.

"We're not going anywhere?" asked Harry when I stopped throwing switches in the midst of the prep.

"No. I still don't know how we ended up here." I was very thoughtful about that. So much that could go wrong after all. What if we ended up in our present, her future?

At which point both Harry and I looked at each other and realized that the future Queen of England had wandered off. In my Tardis. Which was bad enough.

I'd been working several projects of late, and sleep had been one of those things getting short-changed as a result. So when we found Elizabeth the Second in the supposed-to-be-locked Armory hefting a device called the Belkan Overpowered Shock Shell Impactor, which had been in a curio shop in Mid-Childa where such things were considered quaint antiques, I experienced the distinct feeling that perhaps I needed to have a quick lie-down. The expression of glee on her face was not what one would expect of the British Royal Family, but did have a good indication that she knew exactly what the device was.

I'd picked it up because one of the six worlds I was currently capable of visiting had large dinosaurs - some of which are carnivorous. Something with a decent range and capable of stopping a large charging dinosaur was appealing. Just in case I ever got stuck there, or was faced with daleks or something else that really shouldn't be there.

Actually, I wanted to check BOSSI against a Cyberman or Dalek or unreasonable facsimile. Considering that it was much like an energy-weapon version of a SABOT round combined with a proton torpedo - it would make a lovely experiment. If Harry's world had an Adam Savage around, he'd probably approve.

"At least it's not loaded," I noted after I noticed that the power pack was still disconnected.

"I can't believe she's holding BOSSI. You won't let ME hold BOSSI," said Harry. He was ten years old after all. Big guns that made satisfying holes in objects was perfectly all right for him as far as he was concerned. As far as I was concerned he couldn't wield any weapon capable of taking out spacecraft until he was at least sixteen.

She eventually put it down, but I did grant her that it was quite understandable that she would find such a thing of interest when her home town was currently being bombed.

Eventually there was a break in the bombing, Elizabeth left the party, and we tried again.

As stated, I could reach six worlds and my attempts to check with the home office had failed every single time. The worlds were: Harry's world, Mid-Childa, Dino-Earth (for lack of a better name), the Magic Academy world that had a Narnia time-compression effect, some post-apocalyptic Earth that I didn't stick around in once I'd determined that it WAS some sort of post-apocalypse, and finally that Forgotten Realms-ish world.

I was glad that I wasn't going to Krynn as I'd have to fumigate to get the kender or tinker gnomes off my Tardis.

I'd been bouncing mainly to the Magic Academy world to take advantage of the time-dilation effect. Then back to Harry's world in order to travel across distance in the same plane as the D-Jumper wasn't made to travel across distance in the same universe.

So we bounced again, opened the door and found a forest.

So, either wrong place or wrong time and we had to go look to find out which. Because my much-vaunted self-adjusting watch was now giving me an error message.

I have to ask a physicist sometime if there is a law about the technology you're beginning to rely on picking that time to start acting up. Maybe it's something about quantum physics and that Heisenberg Unreliability something-or-other.

As we tried to track down a local and ask, I'd figured out that we were approaching "soft points" in time where something was out-of-place and therefore the timestream had been disturbed. Why, how, and what were all things I had no data on.

It was an operating theory at least.

I remembered a briefing, though the details were fuzzy. Something about "soft places" in a timestream that could be created by something altering that timestream. Ripples that could radiate into past and future from an event, if you don't take the water metaphor too far. Elizabeth not being out of London during the Blitz could be one of those alterations - possibly from something happening in her future or someone mucking about with the past. It was probably centered on England though, the ripples in time didn't necessarily go very far in space. Related but different mediums or something like that.

Hopefully Elizabeth the Second would dismiss her experience as a weird dream or something and forget about it.

I could hope, couldn't I?

- Interlude 9-1 -

"I'm positive," said Elizabeth the Second, cleaning her glasses. "That is the same Vicar and the same Harry I met back in 1940."

Her liason with the Wizarding World sighed as he looked at the TV screen with the grainy frozen picture of Harry Potter sticking his head out of the TARDIS that had been captured during the BBC press conference regarding a new Doctor Who series. "Harry Potter. The Boy-Who-Lived."

"Quite, and the Vicar," said the Queen. "I realized as soon as the TV programme had begun that they had based their TARDIS on his Tardis, despite their denials of such knowledge."

"This completely blows the Statute of Secrecy," said her liason in a grumpy fashion.

"How so?" asked Elizabeth. "Everyone assumes he's a space alien or at least using advanced technology. Nobody has put forth the idea that this is all magic in nature."

"It's easier nowadays to believe in aliens with advanced technology than magical beings," pointed out the Prime Minister. "So the press is just going with that."

"Just so," said Queen Elizabeth, who had been using the pronoun "I" instead of the Royal "we" because this was relating to her personal experiences prior to the throne. "It was considered briefly during the seventies that perhaps this Vicar was attempting to pave the way for the eventual collapse of the Statute Of Secrecy."

"'Eventual', Your Majesty?" asked the liason.

"Recent findings by particle physicists can be seen as stumbling across the basics of magic," said the Prime Minister. "I've already been briefed on it. There's a bet on it from those in the know in fact. Odds generally given is that it will happen around 2050."

"Plenty of time then," said the liason, as the date put it firmly into the Someone Else's Problem section.

"Hold on, breaking news," said the PM as the news programme going on about how the pseudo-Tardis had been spotted at some pyramid with a tongue-twisty name over in South America went to something else.

They'd broken from that with some news helicopter going over the city had spotted a blue box on the roof of some office park and gone for a closer look.

The door opened and a vicar and small boy exited, waved a small device at the blue box, and then went to the fire escape.

"Was that a METAL wand?" asked the liason.

"A sonic screwdriver. He has a sonic screwdriver?" asked the PM. The liason's question registered a moment later with him. "Well, I suppose that's kind of a wand."

- End Interlude 9-1 -

"So we had an Adventure," I told the Grangers. "Can't recommend those. Prefer getting regular meals myself."

"Oh, what came out of it?" asked Dan, picking up a cup of hot tea and squeezing a lemon wedge over it.

"I got to shoot a gun!" said Harry.

"What? Like a shotgun?" asked Dan Granger.

"No, it's a gauss rifle. I picked it up the same time I picked up the BOSSI," I explained.

"Which tells me absolutely nothing," noted Dan aloud.

"A mass accelerator," I explained. "It takes a metal slug about the size of a shilling, accelerates it with magnets to a bit over Mach Three, and sends it off to slam into a target at that speed. I picked that and BOSSI up just in case we ever have to spend some time in that dinosaur world."

"So it's more a sniper rifle sort of thing?" asked Dan, not having that much experience with such things.

"I suppose it could be," I allowed.

"Wouldn't that be BOSSI?" asked Harry.

"No, that's more of an anti-ship weapon," I told him.

"'Anti-ship'?" asked Dan Granger. "What kind of ship are we talking about?"

"I maintain that if a tyrannosaur is ever charging me, I'm going to want something capable of stopping it with the first shot," I told him. And that was at the low setting, because I wasn't going to mention to a protective father-type that I had a weapon which could potentially take down an Imperial Star Destroyer with a full charge and the highest setting. "Which brings me, actually, to my next question."

"What?" asked Emma, entering and closing the door behind her again.

"Well, it was against my better judgement, but Harry apparently has these 'rescue things' instincts," I told them. "And there were these eggs-"

- Interlude 9-2 -

"So I told him flat out 'no'," said the zoo worker. Elaine Montgomery-Fowles had been employed at the London Zoo for ten years and could manage to act quite vexed when she wanted to. Which, actually, was a lot of the time and over just about anything. "The nerve of the man! Thinking he could just waltz in and drop off some eggs of some unknown creature just like that."

Jeremiah Benton had been the zookeeper for five years, having worked his way up the chain from the Reptile House custodian over fifteen years ago. He fixed his subordinate with a flat stare that communicated his complete lack of amusement. "Which is how Longleat Safari Park accepted the offer of TWO TRICERATOPS. Do I have that right?"

"How was I to know?" asked Elaine. "I thought he was barmy!"

"When a blue box appears out of nowhere directly in front of you, and a strange fellow who MIGHT be a time-travelling space alien offers you a pair of recently hatched dinosaurs, you say YES!" Jeremiah informed his subordinate. "And you say 'thank you' and you politely ask if he might have any more! You do not run him BACK into the aforementioned blue box and watch him disappear again."

"But he was a priest! I thought he might be trying to pass off some of that literature they're always trying to force on me," protested Elaine.

"Priests of that sort generally don't travel about in a bleeding TARDIS, now do they?" asked Jeremiah Benton. "Only because you've been an employee for this long is why you're still here and not turned out."

"Well, what about that Stephen King story where the dinosaurs go around eating people? I'd say it was better we not have them at all!" protested Elaine. She'd seen the TV since Longleat had gotten those little lizard-things and there HAD been speculation about the things going off like in that book.

"Triceratops," said Zookeeper Benton, not familiar with the novel and therefore not inclined to correct her on the author. "Herbivore. They'll get rather large and there's a chance we'll be able to get them when they're a bit bigger than they can handle over there but there's a better chance of people getting trampled by them than getting eaten. I'd expect them to be somewhat rhino-like. Still, you might have a point in that it might mean some bad press for Longleat."

- End Interlude 9-2 -

"I didn't expect the London Zoo to turn you down," said Dan, much later.

"Are they still trying to prove that they're not triceratops?" I asked him, seeing that the television had someone examining the two currently-small dinosaurs. Well, small for dinosaurs at least. The ones in that dino-world seemed a little different from the fossil record from what I'd seen in the local library. These would likely be about three-quarters the size of the fossil versions, but I had no way of knowing if that was because the fossil records of this world provided an incomplete picture or if this was a species that had evolved over the millenia to better fit some ecological niche.

"They threw out the idea of them being disguised rhinos after the first exam," said Dan Granger. "Now the theory being thrown around is that they're genetically engineered from mosquito blood in amber. Which the experts on that sort of thing say is complete rubbish because DNA doesn't last all that long."

"You here to give us that list?" asked Emma as she walked in, apparently having finished with a patient.

"Yeah," I began, but then there was an interruption from the front desk of their office. Apparently the press had shown up as they were barging past the technicians up front in order to try and confront me.

"Exit." Have I mentioned that I love that spell? Because I really truly do.

Without catching me there, they had no evidence of the Grangers being caught up in it. So when I appeared down the strip, I merely went in and got a couple of little Indian pastries and then left there. I made sure to flash the bag at the driver of the newsvan in the parking lot.

Still, this meant I'd have to avoid direct contact with the Grangers in the future. Wasn't sure how they knew I was in the neighborhood, unless they'd spotted the Tardis. Hmmm. Might have to get some of those "don't notice me" spells the local wizards seemed to love.