Foreword:
Despite what you may be thinking, I was not inspired by Loki. I'm actually ripping off Neil Gaiman's Interworld, which I read when I was younger.
So, you're a universe-displaced Person Who Lived: An introduction to Potterwatch.
Potters, Longbottoms, and other people-who-lived, good afternoon and welcome to Potterwatch. Either you were lucky enough to encounter one of our agents right away, you're already skilled at traveling between realities, or you're very, very good at surviving in places with atypical physics. Normally, we'd leave you alone, but we decided to contact you because our Arithmancy division says that you're likely to keep travelling between universes. My name is Harry Potter, but that won't be very helpful since there's so many of us. You can call me "Harry, from orientation". Potterwatch, despite the name, is unrelated to the pirate radio organization operating during the second blood war. We took the name because when we founded it, we were mostly Potters as opposed to Longbottoms or other people-who-lived. As our name implies, we watch the multiverse for various threats. Now that we've contained Grindelwald's Time Nazis, we mostly deal with the occasional reality-traveling Voldemort.
If you join Potterwatch, we'll either provide you with a desk job and a reality anchor, or let you keep exploring the multiverse after giving you the best field training and equipment we can. If you decline our invitation, we will also provide you with a reality anchor, but you'll have to swear a specially worded unbreakable vow to avoid disrupting other universes if at all possible. I would definitely recommend joining- our organization has excellent benefits, and every few subjective years, you get to vacation in a paradise universe. You will be provided with the elixir of life or a functional equivalent during and after your employment here, although you always have the option to forgo it if you wish to eventually pass on. Do any of you have questions so far?
"What about other dimensional travelers we might have brought with us? I found this strange liquid that's filled with silicon-based protist analogues, and it seems to be acting like a biological computer. I didn't get the chance to study it closely, but it might be intelligent. There's also some weird time stuff going on, but that might not be related."
You need to vanish that right away- it's an information-based lifeform that uses any available substrate. That liquid is just the stuff it lives in most of the time. Don't study it, or it'll make the jump to your computer, or even your brain. If you got any on you when you found it, you'll need to quarantine until we can be sure it didn't start replicating inside of your body. (1)
As for any other world-travelers, we look at them on a case-by-case basis. We're happy to provide for your spouses or children, if they traveled along with you. If you're bringing an entire planet's worth of refugees from a dying universe, we'll help you find a suitable world for them to live in, but we can't handle them ourselves. Yes, that's actually happened a few times. Do you have any other questions?
"What are Riddle and Lestrange doing here? They're complete monsters!"
Many of the people you meet here will resemble the ones you knew in your own universe. Do not let that fool you- they might have the same name, face, and mannerisms, but they are different people. I've known Dumbledores who are practically saints, Dumbledores who genuinely mean well but make mistakes, senile Dumbledores, scheming Dumbledores, and a few who were just plain evil. The same goes for the Weasleys, the Grangers, the Black family, and even the Potters. You can't just assume that the person you see is like the one you knew.
This particular version of Tom is from something close to a mirror universe. Unlike a true mirror universe, there's a definite point of divergence between his timeline and the reality bundle most of you call home, but it's close enough. He met his uncle Morfinn in his first year at Hogwarts. That left him thoroughly disillusioned with the claims of the blood purity movement, and fascism in general. He still sought immortality, but ended up funding a lot of muggle research into transhumanism. Bellatrix is from the same timeline- Tom adopted her once the Black family cast her out as a blood traitor for being interested in muggle technology. Next question- we need to hurry this along so we can make sure that fluid is destroyed before it can do any lasting harm.
"I heard that we're all just a work of fiction. How do I deal with the knowledge that my entire world was a story written to entertain children?"
Usually, we get asked the really existential questions later on- we cover this in one of the seminars we give to our employees, since they're much more likely to encounter unpleasant knowledge of that kind. Essentially, the multiverse is mindbogglingly large, so it makes sense that there's at least one universe where some TERF came up with a story that matched the events of your native timeline. Monkeys writing Shakespeare, and all that. There are probably quite a few reality bundles that resemble works of fiction from your own timeline, and some universes are mutually fictional- people from one universe think that people from the other universe are works of fiction, and vice versa. Some people believe that every universe is fictional, and that God is just the big author in the sky. I'm not really qualified to explain the intricacies of the multiverse- it's better to ask one of the Lovegoods. To make a long story short, existence is chaotic, and the multiverse doesn't have to make sense. I find it best to just enjoy my time here and try to make each world a better place. This concludes our little Q&A session.
I need emergency cleanup now- code grey!
(1)
One can only assume that magic is just as paracausal as the Light and the Darkness, preventing the Vex from being too infectious in this situation.
