Not me with like, some dialogue and one paragraph as a framing device lmao
"I mean, there's only a very small chance it will rewrite history as we know it." The person sitting in the glowing circle of runes shrugged.
"How small?"
"I mean, non-zero, sure, but it's pretty low."
"Could I maybe convince you to stop?"
"Nah."
For a moment, there was no reaction, but then everything seemed to blur, spinning and whirling around Harry until everything was just a collection of colored lines, until nothing but the hands in front of his face made any sort of sense.
The snow crunched beneath his boots, and Harry cursed his luck. Of course, he'd be assigned to hunt the dumbass with the crazy idea down. Now, he didn't think it had worked, not fully, but he had no clue where he was. That was unfortunate, especially if he'd have to do international relations paperwork…
He was in the shadow of some sharp, towering mountain peak and trying to work his way down. Faintly, he could see a green vale in the distance, between smaller slopes. It didn't look too far, but risking Apparition now seemed unwise. At the very least, he cast spells to make crossing the snows easier.
As he attempted to pick out a path that wouldn't require throwing himself down a cliff face, he spotted… something strange. A massive shape, gently dusted with snow, but definitely unnatural. Metal plating covered parts of a sprawling grey-blue surface.
What was it? Maybe some sort of structure? The collapsed household of some particularly stupid wizard?
At least, that was his thought until he got a good look at the slope downhill of the mystery object. Harry had encountered some strange houses in his time, but none he knew of bled.
Great streams of red flowed down the mountainside, ruining the stainless white and melting the snow with its heat. Blood from a truly massive creature. Now that he knew to look for it, he could see it, the faintest rising and falling of tremendous flanks.
And along those massive sides, he saw plates of armor and ropes drawn tight, machinery curving around the massive front. At several points, massive piping went in and out of the body, and Harry thought he saw a crushed cabin underneath the bulk. This was the work of human meddling. But…
But it didn't seem like something magicians or muggles really did. Well, not the wizards and muggles he knew.
There was a whole load of implications just waiting to slam into his mind, but he pushed that to the side. This creature didn't deserve to die like this, bleeding out on some frozen cliffside, abandoned.
He pulled out his wand and tried to fix things.
With time- and a lot of Reparo's- he began to reconstruct what exactly had been going on. It was almost like a whale if there were massive, fleshy hydrogen tanks inside that tremendous bulk. If you wanted to be generous, you could think maybe it was some strange wonder of nature.
But no. When Harry mended flesh and bone, it set into shapes that almost seemed designed. Clumsy splints kept fleshy hallways from caving in under the creature's weight, literal maintenance passages snaked through marrow and meat. Harry had to fight back vomit several times.
Transfiguring the ground to serve as support for the air-whale, he got to see the splintered cabins that had sat beneath it. The crew… well, the consequences of that sort of mass, landing on you? Yeah, not pretty.
Would it even be possible to give a dignified burial to those men? He didn't think so, and he couldn't stop to puzzle it over while desperately attempting to save the life of the whale, but it tugged at his mind constantly. Especially when he found the tattered remains of what seemed to be a naval jack. A British naval jack.
That was kind of a good sign, wasn't it? Britain was still a thing, they just… flew giant whale airships around. As one does.
Crawling through the whale revealed all sorts of bizarre things, like shattered honeycomb from an apiary. The giant flying whale had been full of bees. What.
Hell, Harry wasn't sure what the whale ate, or how it ate, even. The mouth was forced shut by great metal restraints, the same ones that blinded the eyes. Some sort of system to force obedience, Harry assumed.
Eventually, when he reached a point where he thought the whale wouldn't die immediately, he collapsed against its side and sighed.
"I'm sorry this happened to you." A creature like this… it would have been born and raised, literally shaped in the womb for war.
It was a rather sympathetic story.
Harry woke up to see the whale was still alive, thankfully. The problem of food for it was still the elephant in the room- but maybe an elephant wouldn't even be sufficient- but that would probably require heading for greener pastures. And that meant movement.
Making the poor thing's life a little easier before they got going seemed like the least Harry could do. He lightened what he could- not much hydrogen in the tanks- and tried to utilize what painkilling charms he knew.
Harry had to give it a final boost with a levitation charm- one that knocked him on his ass- but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. There was some hydrogen up there, in those gross flesh bags. Whatever name this thing went by, it was one tough son of a bitch.
He laughed as it slowly raised up from the ground, drifting between the looming mountainsides. Hagrid would love this thing, Harry was sure of it.
Heh. Maybe that would be a workable name. It probably had some silly, high-concept name before- Victorious or Glorious or Splendiferous or something- but Harry thought it deserved a little better than that.
Clambering down scaffolding, he went along a great flank covered in something almost like fine hair. This hair or whatever it was stirred in the air, pushing like a million tiny oars, dragging the whale forward under its own power.
Harry crept toward the eye, a mournful blackish thing about the size of a baseball. He knew the ears were probably halfway up the ship or something, but he crouched down and tried to look at it.
"How about Rubeus? That sound good?"
The whale gave no response, but Harry rather liked the sound of it. A gentle giant of precisely the sort Hagrid would love.
(And yes, he knew it meant red in alchemy talk… but Harry had seen a lot of red while fixing the poor thing up. The flanks were gray, the insides were very red.)
With careful adjustment of the levitation charm, they made their way down into a sun-soaked green valley with a charming little village nestled within. It looked charming and continental, and Harry thought it might have been Alpine, although where exactly he couldn't say.
Head into the quaint little village, haggle in a language he probably didn't know, and get a small hill's worth of food with… a couple of crumpled pound notes and a few galleons intended for a beer run.
Easy.
Well, it turned out that haggling was simplified significantly when the other party opened with gunfire. That and vaguely German-sounding shouting.
Not wanting to push his luck, he guided Rubeus away from the village and tried to gather food from the woods. From his repair work, Harry figured that Rubeus was fed, at least in part, by honey piped up from the thoroughly ruined apiaries. Sap was a poor replacement, but they had a lot of trees.
Thorough use of the summoning charm stripped the forest of edible plants for a kilometer, at least, and while Harry had some, the vast majority went to Rubeus. He hoped he didn't clog up the poor thing's digestive system.
Unfortunately, of the things that didn't survive the crash, a map was not included. Not of whatever country they were in at the moment- although they were in a world Harry would recognize- but also of the insides. Surely, if Rubeus was treated like military hardware, a boat or what have you, they would have had a map?
Unfortunately, Harry was left to make his own, a process that was just as fun as you'd think it would be. Still, there were a few neat surprises. There was something almost like the old Hogwarts owlery there, because you know, why not? Why wouldn't the people with giant airship whales also use messenger birds?
But that gave him something else: a time frame. If they actually used birds for messaging- barring the mountain of biotechnological bullshit he was standing under- that meant radio either didn't exist or wasn't super popular yet. Meaning, the late 1800s or early 1900s was the most recent possible time period. The presence of complex guns as armament no old-timey cannon or anything plus the fact that it was an astoundingly complex airship, made him lean toward the tail end of that period.
That… well, that meant the flag would have a whole lot of meanings he may or may not want. If these were the Alps, and if it was around the Great War (because why else is a British warship falling to pieces in the Alps?) then flying north would probably be bad. Germans. Austrians to the East, similar situation. Questionably friendly Italians to the South, and the French further west, almost certainly friendly.
Even if it was peacetime, Harry was hanging under a giant, breathing diplomatic incident. It would probably be best to get over the ocean soon if he could.
From there, he could get to Malta, Cyprus, Egypt, or just go around Italy.
Something told him it wouldn't be easy.