The boy opened his eyes slowly.

Staring up at the men pointing small sticks at him, it took him a moment to seem to understand what he was seeing.

"I guess...we made it?"

He showed no fear of the wands, slowly sitting up and holding his head.

"It would seem so," Dumbledore said. He stepped forward. "My colleagues would be most interested in discovering just where you came from."

"Beach City," the boy said distractedly.

He looked around for a moment. "Have you seen Pearl, Amethyst, Peridot, Sapphire or Ruby? They usually wake up before I do."

Finally seeing the gems on the ground, he lunged for them. "Guys! Guys!"

"Stupify!"

For some reason it took three trained Aurors to make the child unconscious.

"He clearly has an American accent," one Auror said.

The second shook his head. "The muggle money in his pocket was American, but I spoke to a contact in the Salem Institute and he says it's not like any money they use, muggle or Wizarding."

"It has snakes," the first Auror said glumly.

Given the connection between snakes and dark wizards in general, this caused the aurors to glance meaningfully at each other.

"Asking him might have been much easier if he hadn't been stunned into insensibility," Dumbledore said mildly.

"For all we know, those gems might be his world's version of a wand."

"How would we even know if he was telling the truth?"

A new voice came from behind him. "Veritaserum. Slip some in his drink and he won't know any different."

Mad Eyed Moody limped into the room.

"He's at least partially magic resistant," the first auror said. "Which may be part of what allowed him to survive passage through the Veil, "Along with the fact that he's only partially alive."

"What?" the others asked.

"Only part of him is organic. I've run further tests, and at least half of his lifeforce is in that gem of his. The gem is not alive in the same way we are."

The aurors frowned.

The youngest looked up. "It's actually a little comforting, the thought that the afterlife might be at a place called Beach City."

Moody rolled his eye, although no one could tell if it was a sarcastic gesture or not.

"We didn't have a choice," Steven said, staring at his hands.

Dumbledore sat as the child's advocate, with Amelia Bones to his right and Moody to his left.

"Your...guardians had to protect the Earth."

Steven looked up. "Homeworld wasn't ever going to stop."

The pain in his expression was palpable. It had been hard enough getting him to speak in the first place until he'd been allowed to see the gems behind a protective pane of glass.

"What do you DO?" Moody asked, leaning forward.

"We salted the Earth," Steven said. "Made it so that gems couldn't be created there or live there for long."

"And the humans?" Amelia Bones voice was mild, as though this were merely an academic exercise and not a possible genocide.

"They'll be OK. Pearl says that human science probably won't even notice what we've done for a couple of hundred years."

"Couldn't the enemy...bomb...the planet anyway?" Moody asked.

Steven shook his head. "Gems don't care about humans, really. It was the only way to keep my dad and Connie and all my friends safe."

The three adult wizards glanced at each other. Steven had been dosed with Veritaserum in his water, but there was no way to tell if he was resistant to magic. He'd managed to pass through the Veil after all.

"Your guardians have not yet returned."

Steven stared at his hands again, looking miserable. "It was a really bad poison. I don't know how long it will be before they come back."

"Why weren't you affected?" Amelia asked.

"I'm half human. I'm resistant to gem technology." Steven said. His hands tightened in his lap. "And I was on the other side of the planet when they did it."

He'd already described the apparatus the gems used; Dumbledore imagined it as something like the Floo Network although apparently it did not involve fireplaces at all.

"How did you get here?" Moody asked.

It was the most important of all the questions that could be asked. The Veil lead to the land of the dead. A thousand years of wizardly researched had proven that. Steven's description seemed to be of an alternate reality, with a history that seemed to be both similar and different from their own.

"There was this gateway. It was already here when gems came six thousand years ago. Pearl says it might be a million years old as far as the gems could tell."

"A veil?" Moody asked, glancing at the other wizards.

"I don't know what that means," Steven said. "Unless somebody is having a wedding."

No one bothered to correct him.

Steven stared at them for a moment before continuing. "Pearl said there was a chance that it opened up to other universes, but that nothing gemkind had ever send through had ever survived."

He stared at his hands. "Whatever happened, we were going to die. If Homeworld won, they'd never let us live. If we poisoned the world...at least by taking the chance my dad and Connie and my friends would get a chance to live."

"How DID you survive," Moody asked. It was clear from his tone that he didn't believe the boy, but Steven didn't seem to notice.

"I've got my mom's bubble and shield." Steven subconsciously rubbed his stomach over his gemstone. "It was strong enough to protect the gems from the worst weapons Homeworld had. It was our only chance."

"It seems like a likely story," Moody said, the sarcasm in his voice dripping.

None of them acknowledged that if Veritaserum didn't work there was little they could do to force the truth out of the boy.

"It fits the evidence," Dumbledore said quietly. "Investigations have showed that the gemsstones are alive in some fashion."

"And you yourself saw the bubble." Amelia said.

Moody was silent for a moment. "I don't suppose you took a look inside his head?"

Dumbledore grimaced slightly. "He was telling the truth as he knew it."

Of course, there were holes in his story. Primarily, though, they seemed to be due to a lack of understanding. The boy had been home schooled throughout his life and seemed ignorant of much of his own nation's human history.

"Let's say the boy is telling the truth," Moody said. "It could be disastrous."

"Why?" Amelia asked. "He says that neither he nor his offer any threat to humanity."

"His world has a United States, an England, France and China," Moody said. "Just as ours does."

"So?"

"Much of it is just the same in his world as ours," Moody said.

Amelia lifted an eyebrow and didn't speak.

"It's possible they had their own version of a wizarding world."

"He didn't say anything about that," Amelia protested.

"Ask any of Dumbledore's muggle students about wizards on the day before they get their letter, what would they tell you?"

It was certainly possible that his world's wizards were just as secretive as their own.

"His world also has an entire alien species out to suck the world dry like a raisin, destroying all life, Muggle or not." Moody said. "Who's to say it's not the same here?"