Harry Potter and the worlds apart.
Harry stared into the mirror. He felt tears come to his eyes as he saw his parents, and other figures lurking behind them. He frowned. Some of them did not look like relatives, but more like the people he would have liked to meet...people from series he had read in the school library. Larry and Stretch, Texan drifter heroes, Aslan and the Pevensie children, Frodo Baggins, Batman, Biggles and his fellow pilots, the Hardy boys, the Famous Five, even Mary Poppins.
His parents were dead, and so too, probably, were most of the people in the mirror.
Well, they were jolly, and smilling.
Harry hurled himself into the mirror, not hearing the startled cry of alarm from a slightly misty corner of the classroom.
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Dumbledore emerged from his concealment in shock and horror. He wanted the boy to see the mirror in order to want his parents more than the stone he had hidden in it. To hurl himself into it... and to go into it... was more than he could ever have imagined.
And because of the enchantments he had laid, he could not picture Harry as his greatest desire to retrieve him, as only those who harboured no ulterior motives could do so.
And he had a great number of ulterior motives surrounding Harry.
He would have to wait for the bossy bookworm to come back from her holiday to retrieve the boy. She had his interests at heart, which, one had to admit, the red-haired slob did not.
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It was hot. It was also dry, the sort of dryness never experienced in the air in England even during a nominal drought. Harry blinked, and looked around at stark, but somehow beautiful scenery, a stony desert with, far away, mesas, with their scree slopes a more gentle incline at the base of sheer, castle-like inselbergs, striped in shades of red-brown. He turned round, and found himself looking up at a pair of horsemen, who were dismounting. Both were tall, the blond one well over six foot, his shorter, dark-haired companion still as tall as Snape, the tallest man Harry knew outside of Hagrid.
"Howdy," said the blond one. "What sort of consarn business dumps a nipper like you out of the blue?"
"Reckon the poor kiddie got caught in a freak twister," said the other. "Don't worry, lad, I'm Larry Valentine, and this here is my pardner, Stretch Emerson, we ain't no owlhoots nor other kind of varmint. Reckon you'll have to ride up behind one of us to take you home. Where is home?"
"England," said Harry. "I don't know how I got here. I don't think it was a twister."
"England? As in England, Europe?" said Larry.
"Yes," said Harry.
"Reckon you've hit your head in the twister, and forgotten coming to America," said Larry.
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Harry travels various fictional worlds, collecting allies to bring back to deal with Voldemort once and for all.
